On Bread

It is spring and  everything that has laid dormant over the long winter is starving for release.We hunger for the primitive rituals of our mothers, for the strength of hands kneading the dough, for the patience to observe the yeast rising over and over, for the promise of a resurrection born out of our own sour and difficult fermentations. Spring is swelling in the yellow bowl, coming to terms with its borders and pushing up, the floured linen veil lifting, even the pale and rubbery dough is seeking the light.

From the hands of my daughter, who rings up pastry at a local eatery, all manner of scones and day old wheatberry breads come though this door, end up on my table. Meanwhile I have decided to give up carbs,troubled by the inebriation of wheat, the unmindful habit that interferes in the task of living.
My writing life is disturbed by the numbness of the morning after, by the last of the malted Easter eggs devoured at midnight, how I sucked the dust of their yokes until the breath of sugar consumed me. I awoke on the couch just before my daughter left for school, still in my boots with the empty bowl fallen at my feet. No wonder that barley was at the heart of it, it's own germination coaxed forth in the soaking, then abruptly halted, the delicate grains dried and crumbled into ash like the fits and start of my writing life.

In this valley, even the hills are made of bread and one must come to terms with it, declare our own truce, be able to stroll the bakeries and the farmer's markets without filling our baskets to the brim with the beautiful loaves. We must, as the monks say, develop equanimity with all things, even the wheat.

What is your relationship with bread? Free associate a list of words in relationship to the word bread. Imagine a sour yeast from your own life rising. What form would it take? What would that kneading onto the page, that meeting of boundaries, that breaking through look like?

At the Table of Bread

I am at a table that is not mine but I have sat here

 late into the night with my children

and on it’s back torn the braids of the day old Challah

my daughter brought home from her dishwashing job

 in the kitchens of Bread Euphoria.

I have laid down my knife and broken the clever braids

though I am not of that tradition,

 the twelve tribes separating and making their rounds

to every seat underneath a bright wash of beaten egg

until they fell away into crumbs.

Ours were the dry unleavened wafers that adhered like paste

to the roof of your mouth at communion, while you tried to not notice

 how your were choking on so many unsaid words, that hostia cementing

your throat, that host, sacrificial victim itself, without any choice

in the matter of its own consecration.

 Now a bowl of vintage valentines and an Iroquois heart

beaded with the word “Montreal” pays tribute to my ancestors,

my grandmother Josephine’s’ sliver candlesticks I pawned once

 then left in an attic in a Maine farmhouse with my children’s father

before the three of us fled south.

This is not the table of my mother

where we sat as children, knowing her own tonsils had been taken

from her throat as a child right where the porcelain tureen of clam chowder

 had been set down, thick and steaming before us this table, this one here on loan

to me has touched both Challah and the shank end of the ham, been prayed over at Shabbat, has spent summers in the south, been stained with tomato pudding and scraped raw by the oysters grey and mother of pearl shells from the Chesapeake bay, felt all that joy and known those all those dead and living things brought to bear on it.

Hunger and Longing

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." Rumi

This morning, I begin this process of slow revelation. I carve out my name here, reveal the first to you of what it is like to make this slow climb out of such and deep and sifting hole. The walls of my escape are brittle, they crumble with my grasping and oh how the sand of everything in my life that has been crushed by that heavy wave of grief burns the raw skin of my palms. Such longing cannot be what the Buddhists call detachment, what the monks sit hours for on the banks of the Tongle Sap river at dusk, but it rises in me like a yeast that has met the inevitable warm moist breath of God. There is no stopping it except ( and these are the things we can't admit to) the sullen things we ingest to numb the rising, the fatty animal flesh of our despair.
All night, my stomach heaves under the weight of a body that has been burried alive beneath the weight of that unrepentant grief, of what I have unwittingly imbibed, the tiny buttered chatchkes that I cling to in my sleep, that I grasp in my swollen fingers like an orphaned child. Mine, I say, Mine! But what I am holding to is a fairytale that was read to me over and over again on a dark night, and what I thought was to be the prize was a poisoined fruit that has gnawed like a rancid seed in the belly of my heart all my life. I followed the wrong path in the darkness, went strait to the witches house as though I were her only begotten child, wove my secrets into the threads of the wicked queen's shawl. Oh to be yourself when the whole world is the chef that says you are Mexico, America's bitch who lies always underneath and you are only the illegal worker who stands on the treacherous border between the cold line and the twelve burner stove. All night I feel his words, and remember how all the while the children were coloring on the wooden table just steps from that kitchen door, while the backs of reptiles and the bellies of birds buckled to their broken crayons, while the parents were harvesting mussels from the saffron rice there was a war going on in the kitchen that could not be spoken of. And I, the general that sends orders in silence aross the lines for Penne Alfredo with blackened shrimp and asks again and again for thick loaves of crusty bread, am in collusion with this, with the black moles on the citrus huddled in the freezers dark tomb, with the canker of knowing.