Vox Populi
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Barbara Crooker: Pentimento
In the lost rooms of my childhood,
cinnamon and nutmeg float in the air,
sprinkle the kitchen with notes of brown,
and my mother rolls out leftover pie crust
into an irregular circle, which she brushes
with butter, kisses with sugar and spice.
Scrolls it into a fat cylinder, slices it
into rounds. She slides the silver tray
into the oven, and a bit of heaven
drifts into my teenage bedroom,
where angst still lingers. Later, she’ll use
my grandmother’s recipe to simmer sauce,
molten red lava, redolent tones of oregano,
basil, thyme. Time cannot run backwards,
no matter how hard we try. No matter
how much we miss what isn’t there: the drag
from her cigarette, the jangle of ice cubes,
the juniper, the gin.
From Slow Wreckage by Barbara Crooker (Grayson, 2024). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
Barbara Crooker is the author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry. Her many awards include the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.
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Sitting in a medical waiting room where I spend way too much time lately, I smell the cinnamon, but it is grandmother’s kitchen and I am very small
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Lovely poem, Barbara. Thank you.
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oh the story of our lives through scent and taste–beautiful, Barbara, and oh all that seems to hang both said and unsaid in that last line
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the poem is nostalgic until the last two lines and we hear a note of sadness, absence…
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Thank you so much, Rosemerry, especially for your response to the last line–
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She slides the silver tray
into the oven, and a bit of heaven
drifts into my teenage bedroom…
Such a sweet Proustian image!
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perfect rendering of the senses…
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Thanks so much, Laure-Anne. One of the responses on FB was from a friend who DID hangout in that teenage bedroom with me–
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i see that name—Barbara Crooker on the Marquis and know I’m in for a treat. The sonorities of your expression are always intact and your poems do everything we imagine they might. There must be some lovely workshop attached to your life where you can go in and fashion these things, every tool and device you might need at hand—smooth, well worn—still in the last places you set them down.
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the tool and die shop of the heart…
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Gosh, thanks, Sean!
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