MAREN O. MITCHELL

Baking with Bach

Chronically tired, to gather energy while mixing an unrepeatable

version of an applesauce cake recipe, doubled, augmented

by ginger, honey, walnuts, banana, coconut, chocolate,

sunflower seeds and more, I listen to a disc of the Goldberg

Variations by Bach, each note indented in the player piano

of my brain over five decades ago, in Brevard, North Carolina,

recorded in 1955 to ecstasy by Glenn Gould, whose hands

obsessed with each note to note, sporadically self-conducting

and self-accompanying, singing juxtapositioned notes,

caring for nothing else, and I sing with him while I mull

on Louise Glück’s above-the-line Vita Nova poems

and her dynamite Nobel Prize with which she plans to buy

a house in Vermont, where my applesauce grew and simmered,

and I remember listening on the radio to Gould’s 1982 second

recording, five states later in Brownsville, Texas, tempos so slow

that I called the station, a never-before-or-again action,

to point out their speed mistake, as I leaven on today’s good news,

my first publication in Canada, birthplace of Gould,

poems on the colors “gray” and “pink,” in The Antigonish Review

of Nova Scotia, while through the kitchen window and walls,

I see and hear the daily, hourly, obsessed hunt by our neighbors

for fallen leaves, whining motors back-packed,

blowers snaking repeatedly from side to side,

moving the aged hands of trees from place to place,

interrupted by periodic burns, as they try to control by erasure,

caring for nothing else, while Glenn Gould will continue

to give us his state of wonder,

repeated visions of obtainable joy,

until we erase ourselves from our planet.

The cakes bake. Odors of earth rise.

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems appear in The Antigonish Review, Poetry East, The Lake and Tar River Poetry. Four poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her chapbook is In my next life I plan... (dancing girl press); her chapbook, A Letter Opener, was a finalist for The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize; her nonfiction is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide(Line of Sight Press). She lives with her husband in the mountains of Georgia, USA.

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