Baguettes

What can match the flesh
of fresh baguettes when morning

bursts through the bakery door
and shadows roam the loaves?

At 6 am, every Paris roof’s rising.

Pores do for the dough what
bubbles did for champagne.

You say you’re done with hunger
and gain; you’re finished wielding the knife.

How will you spread the butter?

.

list poem

Unlovables

There are certain seats on airplanes
that can’t arouse affection, several metropoles
of the Midwest impossible to warm up to.

Some people can’t be loved, whole groups of them,
such as mall-trawlers, teenaged and petulant.
You draw an arc around them.

Date-riddled fruitcake. Tin cans
and tap water earn no one’s ardor.

There’s that table near the restrooms
at Mauro’s Trattoria
that you don’t want to sit at, ever.

Some creatures are better left unloved,
like the black rat snake of Canada.

In some cases, you long to love:
a feted painting, for example,

or the nice man who adores
your every pore, whom
your mother loves
but you like less
and less.

.

Papergown

White sleeps by the bucketful.
White lies down in pieces.
White snaps like the pearl bones of birds.

White staggers in its enormity, its pachydermal sadness.
It shores up the dyke denying night.

White burns its blank onto my retina,
slips a cake of soap into my robe.
It claims me as erasure.

From time to time white reminds me
of all the water shapes that quake, beads
tugged by suction through a tube.

By the tic of my eyelid, I am moving
towards white with all alacrity,
with all my parts,
which are sore and terrible.

**************

My starting word was "papergown," which I read somewhere I don't remember, and which triggered "pachydermal," because of the P and also because a papergown is like skin to the pachy's dermal. I also collected "enormous," one of my favorite words, though it morphed here to "enormity." The other words just came.

Read Write Poem prompt 17

Drawing Exercise: Dissolve

To be truly sad, you have to know the right people.
But since the whole world was marching,
I kept on marching.

The leper was kneeling by the pond, turning
to crumbs for ducks and pigeons.

Instead of roadwise, I took
to rounding water.

If I could have sealed out that erosion,
I’d have sealed it with a footprint.

If I could have filtered salt from avalanche,
god knows I’d have filtered.

Without rippling, I was going lightly round.
By the second day, I could not spot him.

His clothes were lying on the ground.
The pond turned blue.
The road was brown.

.
(the prompt asked to choose an element as a springboard for a poem. Make mine water.)

Moody Snow Poem

Snow brings the necessity of sleds
which means a 20-mile drive northwards.

By wailing, the brakes take note of damnation.
Toddlers in snowsuits like comrade reindeer
stagger incapacitated in the aloofness of cloudveil.

In haste, I’ll grasp at any antler
but there is no place to park.

Sky, you doer of fireworks, we’d settle
for a short walk in peaceable packdirt.

But snow brings out the beast in everyone.
Theatrical colonist of mountaintops,
whistle some sleet into man’s moodiness,

let these wheels spray milestones
into the avalanche we’d well abandon.

.

RWP prompt, barely

*poof*

Vigil

Sleeves sewn with bells shall end the day without ringing

(...)