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Imagine that motion, the turning and pressing,
the constant folding and overlapping, the dough
swallowing and swallowing and swallowing itself
again, just as the sea, bellying up the hard shore,
draws back under its own next forward-moving
roll, slides out from under itself
along the beach and back again; that first
motion, I mean, like the initial act
of any ovum (falcon, leopard, crab) turning
into itself, taking all of its outside surfaces
inward; the same circular mixing and churning
and straightening out again seen at the core
of thunderheads born above deserts; that involution
ritualized inside amaryllis bulbs
and castor beans in May.
Regard those hands now, if you never
noticed before, flour-caked fists and palms knuckling
the lump, gathering, dividing, tucking
and rolling, smoothing, reversing. I know,
from the stirring and sinking habits
of your own passions, that you recognize
this motion.
And far in the distance (you may even
have guessed), far past Orion and Magellan’s vapors,
past the dark nebulae and the sifted rings
of interstellar dust, way beyond mass and propulsion,
before the first wheels and orbits of sleep
and awareness, there, inside that moment
which comes to be, when we remember,
at the only center where it has always been,
an aproned figure stands kneading, ripe
with yeast, her children at her skirts.
Now and then she pauses, bends quickly,
clangs open the door, tosses another stick
on the fire.
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 PATTIANN ROGERS was born in Joplin, Missouri, and
graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA from the University of Missouri in
1961. She received a Master of Arts from the University of Houston in
1981. She has taught at the University of Texas, the University of
Montana, Washington University of St. Louis, and Mercer University as the
Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. She taught in the Creative
Writing Program during the spring semesters, 1993 to 1997, at the
University of Arkansas. She is the mother of two sons and a
daughter-in-law and lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in
Colorado.
Rogers has published ten books, most recently Song of the World
Becoming, New and Collected Poems, 1981 - 2001 (Milkweed Editions).
This book contains all of her poems previously published in books, plus
forty new poems, and line and title indexes, It was a finalist for the LA
Times Book Award and was named an Editor's Choice, Top of the List by
Booklist.
Her sixth book, Firekeeper, New and Selected Poems was chosen by
Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books Published in 1994 and was one
of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Award given by the Academy of
American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the
United States in 1994. It also received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award
from the Texas Institute of Letters.
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