Making Bread, New Year’s Day

For Tim

 

Shaped like a brain, warm as the flesh

of those soft responsive hidden

oases for hands (euphemism

for buttocks, belly, breasts),

the supple dough, culmination

of formula and feel—

of call of water waking

yeast from its dark pantry dormancy,

of flour binding both

as a gentle stir urges sticky

dendrite clumps to abandon

the bowl’s safe sides and succumb

to smoother wholeness—

yields to easy rocking

pressure from pad to fingertip,

releases its secret pockets

of breath, readies for rest.

This swelling, springy,

private planet is a euphemism for

tomorrow’s bread,

and the next day’s, and the next,

and that, another way of saying

shared sustenance, somehow never stale.

Years ago I told you how I sensed

potential in our touch, in the recipe

of our intermingled thoughts.

You said, “Not ‘potential.’ Promise.”

 

 

 

Painting a Room of One’s Own

 

It began white as a skull.

What color, what color will sing?

Sugared Almond, Daffodil,

China Rain, Glass Slipper, Manuscript

(cream, yellow, green, blue, beige).

The other rooms’ walls seem to complete

a chord, so what is left for my lair?

For, finally, my solitary sanctuary,

no considerations needed other

than my own mid-life taste tutored

by mounds of magazines, tempted

by dozens of charmingly-christened chips,

each one inch square?

Name that tune

from one note.

Perhaps desperate for difference

I choose

pink.

 

Pink?

 

What, am I

regressing fifty years, to a fairy princess

bower, Disneyesque? Or worse:

two decades back, to a dream

nursery never needed?

No: the objective is to echo

the conch’s inner curve, soft Bermuda sand,

granite from Bagalkot—delicate,

the hovering hue before

dawn’s rosy fingers rip the sky wide open.

Yes, a subtle blush for me.

No crescendo, now. A psalm,

a balm, a fleur-de-lis in bas-relief,

yet not neutral.

 

Furniture pushed aside, cloth laid, cracks spackled,

the lid pried, the glossy O of originality exposed,

I revel in Apricot Cream for hours,

massaging luscious color with the thirsty roller,

using zigs and zags, then filling in the spaces,

pestered by a zesty breeze from open

windows, hastening the process

toward permanence. Then gradually,

gradually as sunrise, it occurs to me

as one wall’s spanned with hue, then two,

then three: I’ve made of my perfect sanctuary

a melted strawberry parfait. Or Oklahoma

in a U.S. map from 1953. Or Silly Putty.

 

By then, the light is gone. Too late. It’s time

for supper. Leftovers. To do with as I will.

Reminding me that there’s a partial can

of paint remaining, from when this drab

kitchen was shiny, new. So that,

tomorrow, will be my salvation:

Secret Passage. Yes, it’s gray. But so

is the hour of Lauds. So is the welcome

unknown. So is the misty song

daring to arise

from a dry throat.

 

 

 

Jeanne Julian’s poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review and other journals, also winning awards in competitions sponsored by The Comstock Review, The North Carolina Poetry Society, The Lanier Library, and the Asheville Writers’ Workshop.  Editor of a photography newsletter, she is the featured photographer in moonShine review (Summer 2015).

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