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).
