The Acolyte: Kitchen Solace

Today the poem "The Acolyte" by Denise Levertov is on my mind. In the piece she equates writing a poem to baking bread: the hard work, the love of the task, the expectation and wishes for greatness. I have been feeling down today with much on my mind and clouding my thoughts.  Maybe it is the weather, unseasonably warm with all day rain that seeps into the pores--almost eerily spring like. Maybe it is the silence of a good friend looming over me, the feeling of impending loss. (Of course, I am a bit melodramatic, so...) Perhaps it is simply end of the semester stress, my classes winding down to less than a handful now, the monumental stack of essays in my bag weighing on me in a more figurative way. My hopeful students, ready for exams, seem so eager to just be done with it all. I feel that way too: ready for a longer break, but there is something sad, too, in the ending of something so familiar and rhythmic, losing people you've grown to know, perhaps not exactly as friends, but as friendly faces--something intimidating about starting again with a new group.

When I am feeling low, sometimes I bake. Like Levertov at her table, I find something very soothing about the rhythm of the kitchen. I suppose some would say that I am addicted to food: I agree, actually. But there is something there, something about food. It is warmth and comfort, love--not just sustenance. It is (as Levertov writes) "more than bread." Cooking is like a carnival for the senses. Some of the most beautiful sights on Earth are found there. I am speaking not just of the cookies I baked--the deep, rich brown of the melting chocolate, white swirl of sweetened milk, the cookies themselves crevassed with secrets and promises to be shared--but of many foods: one of my favorite synesthetic images is the round plane of a bubbling cheese pizza as it is pulled from a stone oven--the cracked pattern in the brick, the scrape of wooden paddle against the brick, the earthy smell of hot oven and yeasty smell of baked crust, the smell and feel of the fire--as if it is something living, the breath of the oven. (This also explains my three year stint slinging pizza during college.) Smells, obviously--especially I love anything with cinnamon or chocolate, of course. Sounds: if I am silent and patient, the pot hisses and clinks, the liquid bubbles, the oven ticks, the ingredients shift in imperceptible whisper. This is not speech, but there is a pattern here. Perhaps not language, but a comforting and primitive type of song.

I want, as Leverov does, to write poems this way: to create, ingredient by carefully selected ingredient, something that pleases all the senses. Something that speaks of hope and happiness and home and comfort. But, today at least, my soul feels too heavy and dark. So tomorrow I will make it my ambition to write a kitchen poem, to build with my words something that can capture the peace and ease of standing at the barely warm eye stirring and stirring and stirring until chips and butter pieces yield and meld. I'll pay homage to the senses at play in the kitchen, thankful for the sugar rush that raised my spirits enough to make it through the night without being completely miserable, even if a bit melancholy. But for now I think it is time for laying in bed, a cup of tea balanced precariously on one knee while I grade a stack of ever increasing papers until sleep takes me to a place where the sun shines but the wind blows like fall again.

The Acolyte

The large kitchen is almost dark.

Across the plain of even, diffused light,

copper pans on the wall and the window geranium

tend separate campfires.

Herbs dangle their Spanish moss from rafters.

At the table, floury hands

kneading dough, feet planted

steady on flagstones,

a woman ponders the loaves-to-be.

Yeast and flour, water and salt,

have met in the huge bowl.

It’s not

the baked and cooled and cut

bread she’s thinking of,

but the way

the dough rises and has a life of its own,

not the oven she’s thinking of

but the way

the sour smell changes

to fragrance.

She wants to put

a silver rose or a bell of diamonds

into each loaf;

she wants

to bake a curse into one loaf;

into another, the words that break

evil spells and release

transformed heroes into their selves;

she wants to make

bread that is more than bread.

Denise Levertov