At the Good Day Café

                  for RG

While John Owen and Christ’s grace
were the content of his chat
that swelled and eddied as he sat,
the gentle etchings on his face

left traces in the rumpled air
above the new blue café booth
in what was once a crowded room
where waiters flit about and stare.

Above a BLT, his long, lean hands
tugged loose-jointed strings of words.
He moved them like lithe puppet birds
across the table’s narrow stage

and mimicked John’s immense exertion
with limb and lip and nodding head,
a poppet’s lanky outsized tread
to praise God’s grace in gaudy motion.

He pecked at crumbs, he drank his tea
half absent-mindedly. He ate
the broken fragments on his plate.
His fingers flew about with glee

as on a crossbar with its strings
attached to flighty mannikins
while he ventriloquized of sins,
then of the good Christ’s suffering brings.

John Owen, a Nonconformist Puritan minister and theologian, was the author of dozens of books on theology and related topics. He’s perhaps best remembered for his 1648 book on the atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. Like other theologians of the period, he divided his topics into numerous points and subpoints and wrote extensively on each one.