While Making Bread by SR Inciardi

Patricio Nahuelhual

While Making Bread

Random thoughts occur at the oddest times, mostly 

when I’m absorbed in the minutia of the different bowls 

and what must be sorted into each of them, 

when the chilled air from the open door 

of the freezer escapes and comingles

with the warmer kitchen air. The chill and the warmth 

coming together like light and darkness     leaving neither 

the way it was. The way edible ingredients 

are turned into fare     even as the precise sequences 

may be forgotten. Beyond sustenance, 

I look for the distraction in an invented cuisine 

whipped by the needs of culinary science 

based on imagination. I can taste the expected, baked aroma 

among the flour     and the passion for counting. 

But again and again I’ve thought: what is the purpose 

of bread if what I scribble on a menu alone

will certainly satisfy a starved palette, when my emptiness     

cannot be made whole with bread or a delectable new menu? 

Isn’t it about my choices beyond the roadways of the tongue,     

when endless craving can be stirred, swirled together 

and shared? 

What is food’s purpose if not communion of separate minds 

surviving across a table’s candlelight, the clink of glasses— 

even when it’s not a celebration that speaks to its purpose.

So when I cook a meal, fresh bread will stand beside it, 

it will dip its porous self into the muted laughter 

and the rubbed recollections     evaporating into the air 

like known secrets     the art and the science 

uncorked and poured     the spoken and the unspoken 

whipped and kneaded into familiar textures

during our savored times when we come together, 

sharing what may cross our lips in either direction

to then rise and leave like wind     rain     or sunlight     

into our separate lives. 

© SR Inciardi

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SR Inciardi

SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. He was employed in the health care industry in New York and New Jersey for over thirty-five years. He currently has three books of poetry listed on Amazon. These collections are entitled Coloring Outside the Edges, The Aroma of Thawing, Poems on Grief and Recovery, and The Aroma of Lilac, Poems on Hope and Healing After Loss (Second Edition). SR Inciardi's poetry has appeared in the USA, India, Australia, and in Europe in various online and print magazines. 

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