Before Bread

In the dream the wheat burns standing.
No storm tears it. No reaper enters.
Each stalk keeps its thin psalm of height
while fire climbs through it from the root,
a blue obedience, a bright undoing.

I run to save the field.
I am already counting winters,
already lifting the mouths of others in my mind,
already loving the gold because it can be given.
Then smoke crosses the furrows
and chooses me.
It threads the throat.
It puts its bitter thumb on the tongue.
It fills the chest with a blackened sweetness
that will not let me call this loss by any gentle name.

Let the false harvest go, You say.

Not from the sky.
From inside the burning.
And suddenly the sheaves are no longer out there
but stacked behind my ribs:
bundles of usefulness,
goodness tied tight for admiration,
kindness dried hard in the sun of being seen,
all the bright labor I meant to carry to the hungry
before Your hand had touched it.

My palms blister on emptiness.
My mouth is full of chaff.
The spine becomes a furrow.
The heart, a kiln.
You do not ask for ash alone.
You ask for grain stripped naked,
for the husk of being needed
to go loose in the midnight wind.

Let the false harvest go.

I answer in the old human grammar:
there are poor ones, Lord;
let me feed them first,
burn me later.
But You are severe with mercy.
You will not let me offer raw wheat,
will not let me hand out my unbroken self
as if the field’s first brightness were bread.
You turn me toward the center of the fire.
No fence. No barn. No witness.
Only flame taking the measure of what I called fruit.

And the burning enters further.

First the stalks.
Then the names.
Then the careful face lifted toward approval.
Then the hidden greed to be nourishment
without ever passing through death.
Then even the grief I polished
until it looked like holiness.

What remains?
Kernel.
Nerve.
A white weather under the skin.
The body learning subtraction
as blessing.
The hands empty enough
to be kneaded.

Spirit of the threshing floor,
feed me to the blaze.
Drive Your millstone
through the last hard clots of I.
Make flour of this defended hunger.
Let water find me where form has failed.
Let the fire close its red mouth around me.
Do not spare what must be changed.

Then I see bread begin:
not in the field’s applause,
not in the waving gold,
but where grain consents to lose its name,
where powder and water enter one wound,
where heat, having devoured the lie,
gives back a body fit to be broken.

Morning comes without horizon.
The field is gone.
Ash lies over the earth like a veil after weeping.
I kneel in it until warmth begins below the black.
Not stalk. Not name. Not the gold that asked to be seen.
A dark loaf rises under the ribs.

Fire was the first mouth.

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