This Is Your Cup of Tea

The title has more than one meaning:

First, we’re going to tell you about a cup of tea;

And then we’re playing.

 

The cup of tea is from India, maybe,

And then it is right here.

This means it is foreign and domestic at once;

Away and immediate.

 

The tea flows

And there is the resisting and helping cup.

How firm the cup seems

Compared to the flexible, the liquid, the soft tea.

What could have more differing temperaments

Than a porcelain cup and flowing tea!

 

The cup, by itself, is down and up.

Good for the cup!

 

The cup, by itself, is severe,

What with its being hard.

However, it curves so gracefully.

The cup is severe and yielding.

 

The tea, the tea is there;

It remains;

It is still.

But we know the tea is in motion,

For it flows.

Stillness and motion,

In the same two seconds, Dwight!

 

The color of the tea is assertive

And also reclusive.

Boldness and modesty, Alice!

 

The cup has a center

On which a perpendicular line

Could rise.

Nevertheless, the cup is wide.

Verticality and horizontality and such, Euphemia!

 

Your cup of tea, then,

Is an arrangement

Of opposites, contraries, oppositions, polarities,

Contrasts, warrings, jars.

The cup is a series

Of reconciled jars.

 

This is your cup of tea:

A study in

The everlasting opposites.

Live with it, Horatio.

It is your cup of tea.