REFLECTION OVER MY FOURTH BREAD SINCE FEBRUARY 2020
My days start with the memory of before.
My mind a trickster with habits and yearnings.
I turn for comfort to flour, ground from shaft to bran,
once green now a muddied cream, smooth, like silica
that disappears in water, lukewarm
like the baths that now define my weeks.
I add the starter that does not know we are dying,
that needs so little to live. I envy its tenacity,
even though some part of me knows—this will pass.
That part of me that sits on the near-invisible strands in all my cells,
that part that survived pogroms and poxes, droughts and deformities
only to find its continuation stifled by my refusal to pass it on.
Where once I reveled in the pounding between provings,
I now relish the wet softness of dough as it undulates through my hands.
I ache this phase, this knowing, like our childhood, that it is
precious and fleeting, the key to everything that will become.
I wonder if this mass, like the me who is a faint memory,
wants to become hard crusted and pulled apart.
I pause before the warmed oven, wipe a tear or sweat
or fear that leaks from my pores despite diversions and meditations,
and slide the readied mound in. And wait. This is not how I saw my days,
spent in a fluidity that might have seemed appealing. Full of waiting
for this bread, waiting to work again, to know the days,
to breathe without masks and touch another human.
I do not notice my smile, the way my hand reflexively brushes
my belly as the scent fills my home. But this is a remnant of desire.
I warned you. Habits and yearnings. I will only stare
at my creation, feel its cooling shell harden in my hands,
remember how this gave me satisfaction three months ago,
how the world then seemed large and full of texture.