Cinnamon Dreams

(with lines from Maxine Kumin)

The microwave hums

to the merry-go-round coffee, stale,

framed Love Never Fails crowns

with angels the sponged-blue wall

above the stove.

Slopping cinnamon creamer

half into the black swirl in a blue mug,

half onto the counter

in my kitchen (immaculate, Easy-Offed)

I sop up the spill, a smell, that kitchen smell.

I hear bread slapping in a white dishpan

for its surrender of gluten.

"So the bite will be right," my mother says

scraping sticky white strings

rolling snake-shapes in the rubbing off

from her gold band;

then, set to voluminous rising,

a storying time

waiting on that living thing,

out of the white-mouthed

dishpan, flooding green marble, foam on the sea.

Under grandmother's rolling pin,

thick wood you never washed,

that thing exhaled and flattened,

my mother pressing stories into the dough,

parables for the waiting,

a pearl of great price, a prodigal son,

prodigal dough.

Cinnamon bark and sugar cane

and butter I'd treadled through

the swinging motion of paddles,

agitated from a thick-skinned

blanket of fresh milk.

Butter gleaming flat down dough's side,

greasing more parables;

the tares and the sower, bread cast

and returned on the water.

Cinnamon dust and sugar and flour

fogged extravagant incense,

ashes to ashes dust to dust.

O wasteful Heaven, the Jewel of the Just,

a pearl for all this heaven

for the sake of the cinnamon clouds, come.

Come another rising of disorderly remembrance;

Come to the dough, to the pearl, to the baking.

Come casting a spell from the hellish oven

a crusted cave, cherries and apples in

drippings blackened to ash.

O placeless heaven, not immaculate, come.

Holy remembering, come.

Come in while my life is taking place;

Come settle over immaculate,

shed ashes to cleanliness.

Oh pearl, oh heaven, Come.