My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

“My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop” maintains a casual, intimate tone across its six stanzas. Composed of rangy lines of uneven length, often end-stopped to create a slow pace, the poem begins with an intimate, detailed description of the coffee shop experience the uncle cherishes. Nye describes the “serum of steam rising from the cup,” (Line 1), creating a medicinal, hypnotic, and comforting sense with the word “serum” and the consonance of “s” sounds across the line. “What comfort to be known personally by Barbara,” the speaker says, “her perfect pouring hand and starched ascot” (Lines 2-3). Here, the speaker hints at the distance between the uncle and the server, which is a theme more deeply explored later in the poem. Even though Barbara knows her patron “as the two easy eggs and the single pancake, / without saying” (Lines 4-5), she doesn’t know much else. As the reader learns more about the uncle as the poem progresses, it becomes clear that Barbara, with her very American name, is perhaps kind and good at her job by providing a comforting atmosphere for the uncle but is not a true intimate. Much of the comfort she provides, the speaker notes, come from the “pleasure” (Line 6) the immigrant patron experiences at being able to get his order, or “anything without saying” (Line 7). This alludes to the language barrier between people from differing cultures, and how comforting it feels to be understood without having to potentially fumble with the nuance of a second language and risk being misunderstood.

Nye continues the thread of language, or the lack of it, in the second stanza: “My uncle slid into his booth. / I cannot tell you—how I love this place” (Lines 8-9). Indicating his speech with italics, Nye gives voice to the uncle and expresses how he speaks about the difficulty of speaking. Having established the relief that may come from not having to speak to place an order, Nye pivots and explores a different kind of expression as the uncle attempts to articulate his love for the favorite coffee shop. He has his own booth and has established both habit and ritual around his meal. Nye describes how he drinks a glass of ice water, saying that he “hailed from an iceless region,” (Line 11), creating a sense of epic, or mythical, past for him, and establishing the dramatic differences between his home country and his current one. She notes that although “he had definite ideas about water drinking” (Line 12), expressing these ideas was more difficult. All the time he used the same refrain, “I cannot tell you” (Line 13), but the speaker notes that despite this claim, he would always proceed to best explain whatever he wanted to articulate.

Nye describes the uncle as someone who “wore a white shirt every day of his life” (Line 14), creating a sense of habit and ritual, and perhaps alluding to a particular uniform the uncle wore for work. She expands this characterization of him, noting that he “raised his hand against the roaring ocean / and the television full of lies. He shook his head back and forth / from one country to the other / and his ticket grew longer” (Lines 15-19). Here, she establishes the dual consciousness he experiences, suggesting that voices from both locations influence him, and comments on the powerful, potentially violent ocean separating the two. Playing with the gambling phrase “double or nothing,” Nye writes shifts her lens to encompass a larger swath of the population: “Immigrants had double and nothing all at once. / Immigrants drove the taxis, sold the beer and Cokes” (Lines 20-21). In referencing gambling, Nye emphasizes the risk and high stakes faced by so many in the immigrant community, and immediately makes concrete their livelihoods as she describes their work in support or service industries.

Returning to the uncle, Nye writes, “When he found one note that rang true, / he sang it over and over inside. / Coffee, honey” (Lines 22-24). Nye again acknowledges how language and communication operate and provide pleasure for the uncle and for the speaker relaying his story. Specific, evocative words—coffee and honey—have a musicality that registers with the uncle, and allows him to participate in the shared commerce of the coffee shop. Despite this sensation, when he looks at the other people in the booths, with “their loose banter and casual clothes” (Line 26), he shares their space, but “he never became them” (Line 27): Nye emphasizes the separation many immigrants feel within the American cultural landscape.

The speaker relays that her uncle “finally left in a bravado moment / after 23 years, to live in the old country forever, / to stay and never come back” (Lines 28-30). Despite the warmth the uncle feels for the coffee shop, the reader learns that during his decades in America, he never felt comfortable enough to want to stay. His emphasis that he wants to return to the old country forever underscores this and simultaneously suggests a nostalgia for his one home and a lack of connection with his current one. The speaker’s voice enters, suggesting hope that perhaps both feel, or want to convince themselves to feel: “[M]aybe it would be peaceful now, / maybe for one minute” (Lines 31-32). She returns to the uncle’s repeated refrain from earlier in the poem: “I cannot tell you—how my heart has settled at last” (Line 33). The uncle feels heightened and conflicted emotion about his return and thus his separation from the family that remains in the States. He feels overwhelmed by this and falls back on his claim that he “cannot tell” (Line 33) how he feels, yet he offers some explanation. The image of his heart settling “at last” (Line 33) allows the reader to consider the years of tension and longing he experienced in his 23 years away from his home country. The speaker says the uncle follows her and another figure to the sidewalk and tells them, “Take care, Take care, / as if he could not stand to leave us” (Lines 35-36). Again, Nye subtly conveys the uncle’s ambivalence, and the way he feels tethered to both countries.

Nye’s fifth stanza comprises a solitary line, the repeated “I cannot tell—” (Line 37), this time without italics, suggesting that the speaker is taking on her uncle’s mantra, or perhaps recalling it in memory as she thinks of him. Placing the line by itself emphasizes the speaker’s emotional reaction to her uncle’s leaving and sets the reader up for the powerful gut-punch that comes in the next stanza when the uncle dies. The speaker writes that she cannot tell “how we felt / to learn that the week he arrived, / he died.” (Lines 38-40). The simplicity of the language underscores the senselessness of the uncle’s death, and the speaker’s feeling of helplessness in the wake of it. She adds that she also cannot tell “how it is now, / driving his parched streets, / feeling the booth beneath us as we order, / oh anything, because if we don’t, / nothing will come” (Lines 40-44). Nye ends the poem on an unsettled, unresolved note. She suggests that for the speaker, some sort of action is necessary, even an unspecified order at a coffee shop, to try to move through her grief, but this ritual of going to the place her uncle loved does not necessarily provide answers or assuage her grief at his senseless death.