I worked the past three years as a pastry cook
Learning the meaning of the word confection
The back room of the bakery is the back room of myself
Deceptively sized, site of sleight of the hand and reflection.
Is this a magic box? What the recipe calls for
Is spelled out in words and stored beneath the table
Dipping a scoop into each unlabled bin
I weigh out the flours: all-purpose, cake, and pastry.
A cake: and no sensation that I have made it.
A simple product made of hands and rules.
That is my work; this product is my conjure
And question: will the days of words produce?
I worked the past three years in the back of the house,
Ghost-white apron, dove-white apron, worn by visions:
Where there are more buildings than space between the buildings
To see any distance you have to look within them.
Pigeons in this bakery: I hear them
Making their nest-noises high above.
They do not sing, a pigeon does not sing:
It makes a home, then finds it: song enough.
Coming here, making the cakes day after day—
I call it work, but it is a kind of lingering.
I came because it was warm and stayed for bread
Say invisible doves, appearing in the rafters.
I worked the past three years as a pastry baker.
First in Maine, where I woke up blindly in the night:
Time had come to start the doughs. I carried my bike
To the road with no idea where it might be leading.
Memory travels backwards--no, if it did that
The image would plumb from the sky, growing more
Discernable, to land in a white towel in Santos’ hands
So he could gently shepherd us indoors.
Instead I remember correctly—the misplaced starling,
The starling’s capture, the starling’s release outside.
The strange feeling of standing in the sunlight
In the middle of the day. Then, empty sky.
I worked the past three years as a pastry baker
In Maine, in Portland, Oregon, in New Jersey.
When I have worked out all the metaphors
Will I be more or less tied to these places?
5 comments:
i like a lot of this, but think it needs some trimming. maybe you could cut the first stanza and start with "Is this a magic box?" i like the image of weighing, but don't get anything from the naming of the kinds of flour. i think you could make this more interesting by going into the more of the tactile experience of bakery work. then i would cut the next stanza as well. it feels forced to me. from "I worked the past three years in the back of the house" to "Say invisible doves, appearing in the rafters" i love. you might consider "I came for the warm and stayed for bread", or some other minor tweaking, as "because it was warm" sounds a bit prosey. i don't think it's important for this poem that you baked in Maine, but the experience of getting up in the pitch dark to start the doughs is interesting, and i would like more about how strange that is. from "memory travels backwards" to "then, empty sky" i love, and i think you should end there. so, basically, i don't think the element of refrain is doing much for you.
generally i think you have a conflict here between where the poem might be headed and the historical facts it started from, and the more you cut of the real world narrative of your experience as a baker, the freer you'll be to make this poem great.
Ditto Elizabeth's comments on cutting a lot of the detailed facts.... Trimming in general is necessary, I think. It feels verbose.
What does the title mean? I OED'd it and found nothing.
Actually, I'm going to email you more detailed comments. This format is awkward when I really just want to annotate the poem.
I appreciate these comments. I'm still in the process of moving things around and plugging them in different ways, and I think I'm actually going to write some more stanzas, but it's helpful to know which parts spoke to you. Yes, Marianna, I agree that there are too many different kinds of birds; I don't want it to be like that. The "magic box" was an attempt to develop a more subtle magician motif ( was it too subtle to call forth the doves?)
I am reading Robert Lowell right now. I had never read him before, never been able to get into him, but the Collected Works has an intro by Frank Bidart that helped me plunge right into the thick of it the way a good professor will ignite your interest. And some of what Bidart says about Lowell is informing my revision-process:
Bidart writes about a poem that was published first in a magazine and then heavily revised for a later collection:
The two versions refuse to be joined. I think that the poem as a whole is greater in the revised version; but I can't escape the haunting memory of the first.
Well, at some point I said something like this to Lowell. To my amazement he said that he felt the same way. I had fiddled and fiddled with the lines, trying to join the two versions, and failed. He had done the same. I bemoaned this state of affairs.
His reply was something that I have never forgotten, something that resonates throughout his work: "But they both exist."
hmm... the refrain worked for me because it conjures up the repetition of labor, the way the same thoughts sometimes accompany repeated action.
to take a gander at the title, is it from trobar ric? a trobadour, a storyteller...
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