A poem to go with the bread

... by Laura Jensen, the title poem from Shelter. A good example of how a day can contain so much.

Shelter

I had bread rising in a warm oven.

I dusted what was left of the flour

off of and into my jeans

and went downstairs and opened the door

for mail. I found

a woodpecker dead on the threshold.

A hawthorn berry beside it.

I brought a box of white plastic packing chips

down and petted it on the feathers then

picked it up in my hand,

the feathers warm, the body light

and cold. It fit exactly

into the hollow I made for it.

The hawthorn berry beside it.

I left it on the kitchen table.

I thought of it looking

for shelter, coming only into the porch

to a nest at the corner the door made

where it met the jamb, the whole of it

carved with leaves and varnished

in the summer when the landlord repainted.

Or flying into the shapes of blowing trees

in the door window.

And I thought of three tame trees where I walk

that had brushed my head and filled it with dreams

that fell in the summer

to be cut for firewood.

I found a broken shovel

that sits at the side of the house

and buried it bare in a break in the clouds.

Beside the house, under the hawthorn.

The hawthorn berry beside it.

As I walked back to the stairs

the box fell open, and chips

shaped like esses and ees

flurried out on the wind like flakes of snow.

And I took the bread out of the oven,

baked now. An oatmeal loaf.