Half a Loaf
Kay Ryan’s Half a Loaf from p. 58, The Best of It: New and Selected, 2010)
The whole loaf’s loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed cathedral.
The cut face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.
The bread cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.
It is nothing like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.
I say do not adjust to half
unless you must.
The image of a bread as a cathedral, of bubbles as bombing, the exhortation to not settle for a disaster but a wholeness, I keep coming back to.