Advice
Advice
If it comes to asking the mirror
what you could look like in ten years,
punch yeasted dough on a lightly floured
surface instead, and roll it into a loaf.
Bake bread: caraway rye, potato,
honey whole wheat with cranberries,
maybe nine grain. Recall the mothers
and grandmothers of Clearview
and you will remember how.
A couple of hours to rise
in a warm place, then the oven.
Maybe you’ll dream around
in a lifetime of bakeries then. Yoder’s
on Ferry Street or the Boulangerie Girardin
on St. Pierre, or else wake in the dark
to the fragrance of a loaf
you made in the kitchen today.
Now it is roaming the house, maybe gone
as far as inspecting the pump and furnace,
and passing through guest room curtains
to reconstitute itself among books, flattening out
over bags of winter clothing, shoaling and
thinning from one room to the next,
for sixteen hours flowing and streaming until
it finds you way up there in the top of the house.
In that late, aromatic dark you will
sleep as deeply as a child.