caroline misner

Last Loaf

This may be the last loaf of bread
I will bake for you.
I try to teach you how to dissolve
the yeast until it foams
and stir the flour and knead
the dough on a dusted board.
But you show little interest
in such mediocrities,
my sad sick scared little one,
and besides, flour is scarce,
and yeast even harder to find.

I once heard of a man who cured
his cancer by tending a garden
out by the sea. Can my baking
your favourite bread
restore your health? A woman like you
should be all glitter and pride
who can see far and still see herself,
though she can’t even step outside.
It’s the little things she prays for,
like the investment in her own chaos.
Tomorrow we will try making muffins.

 The Bean Picker

These stringy vines have lassoed the trellises,
tightened their cords and knotted around the chicken
wire cages in a sort of strangulation.

But I’m glad I got here when I did,
while the dew still beads the curled leaves with undersides
of barbs that prickle and hook my skin.

I can move easily among them, spelunking the green
caverns of the vegetable patch where prize
tomatoes await their blush, herbs extend their scented

foliage, stiff as bamboo, and I ponder the great
improbability of these stalks growing from seed.
The beans themselves are no challenge to me,

though they resemble the cockeyed vines and sometimes
tend to be hard to find.  The bees hover between
the flopping leaf-tongues.  A spider has constructed

a thin web between the spout and handle of the watering
can and abandoned it.  The sleek pods plop into a tin
pot of water between my feet.  Already an insect is drowning

in it—little valiant one who only came to graze in
the garden, whose appetite punched holes in the leaves
and scalloped their edges like an old photograph.

Six small legs wriggle in one final death spasm, mandibles
snapping, wings singing his last number.
Like the beans, he’s not ready to go.

An Excuse to Bake a Pie

To mollify the doldrums of a grey afternoon
on the cusp of June and July, I decided to bake a pie.
So I sliced the sour unfamiliar stalk and a pint
of strawberries growing soft.

I picked berries such as these as a child,
with my mother and a girl I knew from school.
No one would be befriend her but me
so I invited her to tag along.

Kneeling among the dusty rows of hooks and stems
and jagged leaves with undersides as plush as suede
and the sun searing our backs, we harvested the berries
studded with amber seeds

and sugared with the grit of the dry soil. Overripened,
by the sun, some burst at our slightest touch
like blisters oozing blood, staining our fingertips,
overcome with their sweetness.

Others were still green-white nubs, freckled
like serpent eggs; those we saved for another day
to ripen, though the girl and  I couldn’t resist
their sour taste.

Those we imagined to be acceptable, we dropped
into wooden produce baskets with sides as thin
as paper and spotted with pink birthmarks
from the seeping fruit.

The deposit was a nickel apiece from the attendant
beneath a canvas tarp and they came stamped
in blue blurred ink: “Property of Farmer So-and-So’s
U-Pik Ur Own Berry Farm.”

One by one we filled those speckled baskets, six of them
at final count; the berries bruised against the basket sides,
but were still capped with the green bristly points
of their leaves and stems.

Wasps crawled to suckle the scarlet juice of those
left to rot in the dry trenches between the rows,
bellies split or mashed to a sticky pulp beneath the soles
of our drugstore rubber flip-flops.

Those we considered too perfect to be squandered inside
a Mason jar or crushed inside a pastry shell, we slipped
into our mouths, the sand crackling between our teeth
and sticking to our tongues.

We rose on knees that creaked like rusty hinges to
a hazy sun, scarlet and bloated by clouds of dust,
sluggishly creeping down behind the green barn’s
weathervane and the domes of silos.

Parched for shade and a mouthful of the cool coppery
water from the tap by the shelter, we lugged
our full baskets, two apiece, to be weighed
and paid for by the pound.

I was powdered with dust, a gritty gauze, that clung
to my sunburnt shoulders and wormed into the strands
of my hair and crusted my face, tacky with sweat
and syrupy streaks of juice.                                                                   

The sun’s heat exhausted us. The berries had to wait
until the next morning before reaching their final destination
in some preserve or to fill a crust, or hang suspended
in some jelly mold.

The pie I baked today is a disappointment, a festering
opened wound gaping from an aluminum pan, its sanguine
juices drowning the crumble topping and overflowing
the rim of its crust.

Perhaps it was the berries that were not right; I allowed
them to ripen a day or two too late; perhaps it was
the store bought crust—I’ve never acquired the habit
of checking expiry dates.

Perhaps I added too much sugar or too little starch, or
perhaps I left it to bake in the oven too long.
Perhaps. . .perhaps my excuses are done and all
I can do is carry on.