Poetry: Baking Mountains

Written by an Image Bearer of the Living God. A narrative poem dedicated to a woman named Bruce whose heart never quite left the mountains.

It was the middle of February

when she got the call.

Back home,

[she just knew]

the men would be shaking their heads

at digging into the frozen earth;

The women would move to the wardrobe,

            Fetch the laid-by clothes,

            The hand-tatted lace,

            The age-smoothed brooch,

            The coins that clinked together

            in the drawstring, velvet pouch.

After she hung up the phone,

she turned off the lights

and locked her office door

and went home

to bake her mountain of grief.

On the drive,

her heart wrapped around objects

            and places

            and people.

– all that had gone on before –

She considered the translation from

            “Once we …” to “Never more ...”

In the kitchen,

she moved aside the stainless

and the glass,

to grasp the edge of the wooden dough bowl.

She cupped it in her hands and

her heart saw the old man from Bristol

who had been so hungry that

he had forgotten how to be too proud to beg.

  – who wasn’t hungry in the lean, dry days? –

The old man from Bristol who passed their way

who paid for

            a corner in the loft

            and three days of meals

with his hands and his tools

            and a discarded piece of poplar

            still green enough to carve.

that the women learned to share between them.

The bowl had been

a cause to meet and bake

and fill the fine, stitched-by-hand

muslin bread bags.

Baking in one kitchen,

then in the other.

No sense heating both houses.

Besides, the fellowship was as

much nourishment as the bread

in their early years.

Into the bowl –

            She sifted her memories

            with flour and salt,

            then made a holler.

            She poured the warm water,

            the yeast, the sugar.

                        And waited.

After a time –

            She used the long-handled wooden spoon,

            dark with age,

            its sides worn smooth –

            more a paddle

            than an object capable of scooping.

            She married wet to dry.

Turned out –

            on a lightly floured surface,

            the dough,

            and kneaded it with those memories:

– The creeks they waded:

            Skirts pulled up to an acceptable “here”

            when laughter was still filled with light

            and the shapes in the dark

            matched the shapes in the day

            and they hadn’t yet learned to fear.

– The children they birthed:

            Then learned not to hold too close

            because the snakes

            and consumptions

            and the mines

            would be there to hold them closer.

– The husbands they wanted to love:

            But wouldn’t (not all the way)

            because they would never be first

            or cherished or sacred.

            Too easy to replace Momma, Cook and Maid.

– The parents they buried:

            Leaning together into the washing of the bodies

            the fine, straight stitches in linen cloth,

            the date that said “End”

            in family Bibles.

            Resurrection with each cobbler or

            pan of sizzling Sunday chicken.

– The strength in the number of Two:

            because, really, it only hurt

            to count higher.

            Subtraction came so fast

            but they would always have the Two.

            Right?Right?

            Together, always together.

And then not –

            On that day in February

            with the dough rising

            in the bowl that only she

            and a memory would share.

Funeral food is comfort food,

she thought.

This, I can do.

The women who had been,

and then were not,

rested on chairs in the empty kitchen,

conjured by her hand and

the smell of food from home.

She believed they nodded with her

choices:

Bread, glazed ham, broccoli casserole.

Enough to feed the families

who would come to say goodbye.

Enough for sandwiches, later,

to attempt a filling of the

empty space

that held the loud absence

of a beating heart.

This, I can do.

And in the days and months

and years to come,

no one else would remember the food

she made that day.

No one but her.

And after the table was laid out

in the wake of death,

and the dishes draining in the board,

she folded her hands

and wept.

Baking mountains.

This, I did.