(Alice Mattison dreamed that I wrote a poem with this title)
Bluebeard displayed his wives
in a gallery small as a pantry.
My wife Jane has leukemia
and I sit by her painful bed
as petechiae bloom on her skin
and white cells proliferate.
The summer after we married
I grew a black beard, and Jane
wrote a poem on an airplane
flying home from California:
“The First Eight Days of the Beard.”
After a dozen years I shaved
that curly intractable beard
when it turned as white
as King Arthur in the pantry
where Amos the cat birdwatched
from a yellow breadboxour
furry Attila of mice,
until his eyes glazed over.
In those deliberate days,
Jane made bread so honest,
once it went blue in the pantry
on a hot August weekend.
In her room above the kitchen
she worked at her poems,
and in spring paused to garden,
and in winter to feed goldfinches
blackoil sunflower seed, on days
that started with coffee in bed
and continued with walking
the dog, with loving, with baking,
with answering Alice’s letters,
with mulching roses and washing
abundant hair that is gone now
in her terrible illness.
It is blue in the breadless pantry.
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