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Kissing The Bread

1.
and the fields inside it.
The winter of the crumb, the iron
hoe hacking the furrow,
the hiss of grain in the wind.

The priest in the crust
says kiss, says
In nomine Domine,
bless, kiss.

2.
My mother in the four by seven
yellow kitchen in Queens,
pressing her lips to half a
loaf of day-old challah, the food
of someone else's sabbath,
before dropping it into the red and white
step-on can:
her mother the Sicilian midwife
taught her, taught all nine,
to kiss the bread before you
throw it away.

         Why?
Non so. You kiss it, like
crossing yourself before a crisis, before
the train leaves the station,
before the baby falls,
startled, into a sudden
scorch of air.

3.
No. No doubt
not that. But instead.
Dickinson's "the Instead."
They were full of terrible
accurate sentiment,
those old Italian ladies in the kitchen--
crones, with witch hairs haloing
their chins, with humps and staggers
and nodes of bone ringing their fingers.

Kissing the bread was kissing
the carrion that was the body
of every body, the wrist

of daughter and husband, the crook'd
arm of the mother, the stone
fist of the father.

Kissing goodbye
saying the daily
goodbye, the skeptical
god be with you
as the long loaf sank into ashes,
as the oven sputtered its
merciless complaint.

4.
They were kissing the corn god, you say?
Kissing the host, the guest,
the handsome one who grows
so tall and naked
in the August grove?

But what if they were mocking him,
mocking the crust that stiffened the crumbs
that staled and scattered?

              You thought,
bread, that your magic
salts were eternal, that your holy
taste was your final shape,
but see, you were wrong:
I bid you goodbye, my tongue
gives you a last touch, my teeth
renounce you.

5.
But no again: my mother's kiss
was humble, the mortified
kiss of guilt--I can use you
no longer--and the kiss
of dread: what will I do, challah,
pumpernickel, rye, baguette, sweet white,
thick black, when you
are gone?

             And the kiss, I think
I thought she meant,
of sorrow, as if kissing
the crows that fly low over
fields we never saw in Queens,
the blurry footprints
between long rows of wheat,
the blank sun roaring overhead.

We stood in the Jackson Height's kitchen.
The white 1940s Kelvinator
whirred, no comment, and strips of
city snow crisscrossed the window.

I was eight and baffled.

If an angel should be flying by
when you make that face, she said,
you'll be stuck with it forever.

Elegy

The pages of history open. The dead enter.
It is winter in the spine of the book
where they land, inexplicable texts,
and a small rain falling, a mist of promises,
disjointed sentences, woes, failures.

The dead are puzzled:
was it for this they left
the land of grammar, the syntax of their skin?
We turn the pages. We read.
Sometimes, in moments of vertigo,

we notice that they're speaking.
Tiny whinings and murmurings arise,
as of insects urging their rights, their dissatisfactions,
invisible insects dwelling uncomfortably
in the margins, in the white spaces around words.

Simplicity
- for Elliot

Wishing to praise
the simple, the univocal, the one
word that falls like a ripe fruit
into an infinite well,
I watch

that easy old couple, limber
sixty-year olds,
strolling, maybe just finished jogging,
under plum trees.
Over their mild

gray heads the air
is pink with blossoms
accomplishing themselves;
under their tan, accomplished Keds
the sidewalk's pink with petals.

She turns to him and speaks, a word
that fills and falls like another petal,
easy, simple:
a word of thirst? -milk? wine?-
a word of love? - good run?

whatever,
it befalls him
light as the stroke of a branch,
clear as color,
and he nods, smiles.

I want to learn that word, I want
to hold that word under my tongue
like a sip of milk,
I want to inhale that word
the way that gray-haired woman, now,

turns back to the tree
and inhales the lucid perfume
of a blossom that promises
ripeness, night, the sweetness
of the plum.

The Return of the Muse

You always knew you wrote for him, you said
He is the father of my art, the one who watches all night,
chain-smoking, never smiling, never satisfied.
You liked him because he was carved from glaciers,
because you had to give him strong wine to make him human,
because he flushed once, like a November sunset,
when you pleased him.

But you didn't love him.
You thought that was part of the bargain.
He'd always be there like a blood relative,
a taciturn uncle or cousin,
if you didn't love him. You'd hand him poems,
he'd inspect them, smoke, sip, a business deal,
and that would be that.

Then he went away and you hardly noticed.
Except you were happy, you danced on the lawn,
swelled like a melon, lay naked long mornings,
brushed your hair more than you needed.
Your breasts grew pink and silky,
you hummed, you sucked the pulp of oranges, you forgot
all about words.

                        And when you were
absolutely ignorant,
                             he came back,
his jacket of ice flashed white light,
his cap of pallor bent toward you, genteel, unsmiling.
He lit a cigarette, crossed his legs,
told you how clumsy you were.

Ah, then, love seized you like a cramp,
you doubled over in the twist of love.
You shrieked. You gave birth to enormous poems.

He looked embarrassed and said how bad they were.
They became beasts, they grew fangs and beards.
You sent them against him like an army.

He said they were all right
but added that he found you, personally,
unattractive.

                   You howled with love,
you spun like a dervish with rage, you
kept on writing.

Journal Entry, 1984

Almost February, plums just stalled in bud,
football Sunday, only women and babies on the streets,
and I drive around town thinking of\
what I wanted, how I framed the chain
of months and rains and flowers
in a calendar of my desire,

wanting to be wanted,
wanting to want, sentimental
as some nineteenth-century heroine who crowns herself with
pink
imaginary petals--O how
I dreamed my days away, an invalid on
window seats, a lover between sheets of fever,

and now from the still center
where gifts are given
come daily packages of ice,
and I wonder, blue in supermarket parking lot,
if this failure of the calendar, this refusal of blossoms
is middle age....

                    Sunset.
The chill trees darken and sharpen
their edges, the cold cups of the magnolia
shred in a small wind: it's really
winter still, beyond
the scrim of spring.

Who were you, that I wanted so?
Husbands and fathers hunch behind flickering windows
in closed houses, women push strollers
pointlessly along clear streets,
and I try to remember, as I drive away,
where I set out to get to,
why I'm not yet there.

(from Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)

© All Copyright, Sandra M. Gilbert.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.