Poetry

In the Bakery

/ Brian / 3 Comments

I stand in the bakery. The baker is silent, at work, unbothered by the commotion in the streets, by the kids who run in and grab loaves of bread without paying. He does his work; he is too much like the dawn to talk too much about it. Soon he will hand me the bread I asked for. When he hands it over, whose loaf will it be? I want to share my bread with him, this unmoved one, now moving and kneading his hands through the dough. He bakes bread as if it is the only thing he could possibly be doing. My duty is to eat what he hands me while it is fresh. I cannot let the bread get stale and hard, or eat it in fear that it will soon be stale and hard, or eat it as if I am the stale and hard one, and the bread the thing that will soften and refresh me. If my heart is not as soft as the freshly made bread, there is no bread in the world that will satisfy me.

I’m here in the bakery, waiting, listening. Rise, says the bread, as it’s taken from the oven. Wake, says the wind, as a customer enters. Enjoy, say the eyes of the baker, as he hands me his life’s work, not saying a word.

 

 

Dark Morning

/ Brian / Leave a comment

Dark morning, do what you will do.
Grow light without resistance.
Spread your light to the resistant world.
But too much light too soon might blind me.
First, let my own resistance rest
in you dark hour I rest within.

No one murmurs except crickets,
no one moans for the pleasures of the past,
no one dreads the pain of the future,
for no one is here to moan or dread.
Nothing here but the dark hour.
Not a soul awake that knows my name.

Dark morning, you do what you do
not for me or anyone else,
not to be praised or celebrated.
We should all be so bold
to work in such obscurity,
to toil before the sun
and rest by light of day,
returning alone at dusk
to the desk we left at dawn
so the light within can grow
in the growing darkness without.

Moon Talk

/ Brian / 1 Comment

I.

Meaning no longer carries me like a cresting wave
onto sands silvered by an uneaten moon.
So instead of seeking out the precious meaning
that’s left me in the shadow of half-eaten lunacy
I take a bite out of an apple. I will eat fruit to cope
with the fact that my moon has been eaten.
The grape will be my purple moon, the orange
my sunned moon, and the tomato my blood moon.
Outside, July, middle of summer, who is a pale girl
the rich girls in their animal skin coats make fun of.
Winter is a frail boy who dies of pneumonia.
Summer and winter decided not to make love
and since the moon had already been eaten
they realized they had nothing to talk about.
How much like you and I. I wish my long black coat
didn’t remind me of Death, that snapping turtle
whose shell I am. When you peel the shell off me…
but don’t remind me of that, or I might just snap.
Each day I get more used to silence. I tell myself
the silence prepares me to die. Others tell me I’m only
twenty-five. Who is right? Only the one who admits
he never is. I admit: my life is not worth the absence
of wind or God. Some days are finished for me by 9 a.m.,
and as I lie back down in bed I watch the commuters,
all of them working to earn their keep, make their way,
prove themselves worthy of being alive, in vain;
the moment we were made we were made worthy
of being kept alive and well and whole.
How can we prove what we already are? I am filled
with holes: who of you will have me? I am whole,
there is not a hole in me: who will reject me?
Goddess of night, before you nix me, rejecting
my too-sunny view on life, save me from these books
on this desk that even now rebuke my uselessness.
Double-blind me, so I might forget what I have not done.
I am compelled again to finger the books’ straight spines.
My own spine is bent-over, bony and ornery.
I have trouble believing the evidence of my senses:
that the people still speak, even to my muteness;
that the birds still sing, even to my deafness;
that the sun still shines, even on my blindness.