When I was tumbling young and hurried

and had no words to climb,

but knew the trees on the wide lawn

to shimmy and skin to scrape

into soft bleedings, I would bucket down

plums and black cherries for the scrolled batter

my mother kneaded with her thumbs,

each round pan a single flat globe

of busty dough above the juiced pickings,

and when, in season, Easter currants,

flowing sap along the walnuts I had crushed,

had laid their wintered wash of gravel

on the tongue in so many freshly spun orbits,

and given song to a mind deliciously green,

only then had I learned the world

was not with me as I thought it must,

and had I noticed more the play of metal,

rolling pin, spoon, and the shell cracker

or the miniature tin wheel that crimped and beveled

crust on the ledge of the pastry pan,

I would have known what hard earning

comes with pain for the work of the thing,

that the play of one force on another,

a roller flattening thin the skin of the matted flour

or the nut cracked quick into splits of progeny,

was the child’s first true act of tending

each and every bruise the mind had buried

like a thought with the hard hammer of memory

on whose wide shoulder I carried

the terror of all the world’s cruel anguish.