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A Poem Goes Missing from his Collected WorkJonathan Wells
His poem about the bakery in Paris with its white
tile, fluorescent light, and the alchemy of its ovens
disappeared from its archive. And the baker with flour
on his cheek and small petals of dough on his arms
and apron vanished too. The baguettes he baked
for his immigrant customers, loaves of a promised life,
were skimmed from the city’s surface, removed from
the strange streets that cut through the roots of buildings.
Had I imagined the poem as bread for their benefit,
the epiphany and leavening, confected it myself, offered
it as a gift, a wish for them who had lost their own rivers
and streets, their languages, their mothers and fathers?
Had I written the poem myself in his voice and slipped
it in among his work and had he blessed it not knowing
it was there because it bore his mark? Then, it reappeared
in memorable ink, just three lines, a triplet of hope
between the transport trains and the mind soloing
back, the poem itself nearly gone like all his ghosts—
the river flowing again in its old direction, his first
alphabet like sugar on his lips, and the parents still
sleeping in the same bed they slept in the night he fled.
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