Revisionist Poetry – My Relationship with a Cookie, v.3

I study this chocolate-chip thing on the plate,

its surface a brittle grammar with chips of gold.

You can see only a few bright truths at first —

crumb constellations clinging to the shell.

What the inside must hold: slow heat, brown sugar hymns,

a small dark architecture of salt and memory.

If I tear into it like a gale I will blot that interior out.

If I nibble, forever weighing, I might thin the song into sameness.

The cookie, I think, has an etiquette of its own;

it will not confess its best way to be eaten.

Even starved, I do not swallow the whole story.

I chill it: sever a corner, fold that mercy into my morning bread,

secretly making every ordinary mouthful a little more luminous.