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BREAD AND OTHER MIRACLES
By LYNN UNGAR
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2012 Lynn Ungar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-7358-6
Chapter One
Blessing the Bread Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam,
hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz. Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.
I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when no one is around.
I do not believe in magic,
but I probe the dough
for signs of life, willing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.
This is the lifeline—
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.
Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth. Boundaries The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?
You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?
Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?
Hawks Surely, you too have longed for this—
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air,
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.
Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?
The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.
Each breath proclaims it—
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.
Autumn Equinox You may think of it
as marking the long descent,
the slide into winter's weariness.
Such moments are not easy to accept—
don't we all want to petition
some cosmic governor
to grant summer a reprieve?
But the sentence is always cast,
the scales will always tip,
whatever you might think is just.
In this brief, breath-catching
moment at the top
you may recall the slow climb of summer,
the safe, steady ticking up the tracks.
The self-possessed might even
gaze out and glimpse
the jostling fairgrounds and
the quiet that stretches beyond the fence.
Look quickly. Even now the car
tips forward and picks up speed.
As the wind in your face increases
and your stomach leaps, remember:
This is the ride you came for,
the fear and the sense of flying.
Winter won't seem long
when you slide to a halt
around the final curve.
Masks What will you wear for Halloween?
The trees are changing faces, and the
rough chins of chestnut burrs
grimace and break to show their
sleek brown centers. The hills
have lost their mask of green and grain,
settled into a firmer geometry
of uncolored line and curve.
Which face will you say is true—
the luminous trees or the branches underneath?
The green husks of walnuts, the shell within,
or the nut curled intimately inside,
sheltered like a brain within its casing?
Be careful with what you know,
with what you think you see.
Moment by moment faces shift,
masks lift and fall again, repainted
to a different scene. It means,
the cynics say, there is no truth,
no constant to give order to the great equation.
Meanwhile, the trees, leaf by leaf,
are telling stories inevitably true:
Green. Gold. Vermillion. Brown.
The lace of veins remaining
as each cell returns to soil.
Food chain Give up pretending.
Everything, you know,
everything, sooner or later
gets eaten. Little fish,
big fish, no difference—
the world's mouth
is on you. Outside the personal,
it even has a certain glory.
When the mouse, in its last
short dash to the grain,
feels the great rush of wings,
in the flash before
the crushing beak descends,
it is finally, luminously, airborne.
In the broad, voiceless,
hours of the night
you have always known
the red beak of
your consummation
awaits you. The choice,
very simply, is this:
What will you give
your own beloved
bones and blood to feed?
Thanksgiving I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills—
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.
The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.
Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or a child's prayer before bed.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
dear God, make us truly thankful."
Incarnation The trees have finally
shaken off their cloak
of leaves, redrawn
themselves more sternly
against the sky. I confess
I have coveted this
casting off of flesh,
have wished myself
all line and form, all God.
I confess that I am caught
by the story of Christmas,
by the pronouncement of the Spirit
upon Mary's plain flesh.
What right did the angel
have to come to her
with the news of that
unprovided, unimaginable
birth? What right
had God to take on flesh
so out of season?
When Mary lay gasping
in water and blood
that was of her body
but not her own,
did she choose one gleaming,
antiseptic star to carry
her through the night?
The flesh has so few choices,
the angels, perhaps, none.
The trees will shake themselves
and wait for spring.
The angels, unbodied, will clutch
the night with their singing.
And Mary, like so many,
troubled and available,
will hear the word:
The power of the Most High
will overshadow you and in her flesh, respond.
Salvation By what are you saved? And how?
Saved like a bit of string,
tucked away in a drawer?
Saved like a child rushed from
a burning building, already
singed and coughing smoke?
Or are you salvaged
like a car part— the one good door
when the rest is wrecked?
Do you believe me when I say
you are neither salvaged nor saved,
but salved, anointed by gentle hands
where you are most tender?
Haven't you seen
the way snow curls down
like a fresh sheet, how it
covers everything, makes everything
beautiful, without exception?
Blessing the candles Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam, asher kidshanu
b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik neir shel shabbat Here, in the last
gentle light past sunset,
at the end of the week,
in the last years of the century,
it is hard not to grasp
after the receding light.
It is hard not to wonder
what is left: two candles burning.
Insufficient light to plant
or cook or paint the kitchen—
anything purposeful, that might
claim some conviction of the future.
There is so little we create:
a few lines that take on life,
a bookcase that stands steady.
There is so little that remains,
and always someone wanting.
I could hand out quarters
on the street all day
and no one would be saved
or safe or whole.
Outside, the street lamps
are blinking on into a false
pink phosphorescent cheer,
and we are sitting silent
in the wake of the candles'
first flare. I am watching you
looking at the candles,
or the darkness in between them.
This is the blessing that we
have kindled: this particular dark.
This space between two poles
which we, who are not angels
can inhabit. If you stand facing me,
this is what you will find:
the gap between us where
our common lives take shape,
the space between us that
we reach into for love.
Outside, the royal blue is deepening
to black. The stars begin to form
their million year old light
into constellations which we,
in our demand for form and story,
have decreed. And you and I
are caught between the candles
where we cannot help but live,
in the close and infinite abundance
held between the kindling
and the dying of the light.
Praised be Thou, eternal God,
who has sanctified us with
thy commandments, and required
of us the kindling of lights. (Continues...)
Excerpted from BREAD AND OTHER MIRACLES by LYNN UNGAR Copyright © 2012 by Lynn Ungar. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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