"The Baker", version two

Bread and Fish


The fish leaping leaves a weight in air, silver and sudden.
A word will do that. Yours.
A flashing against the force that pushes back, that rushes,
indifferent, in a hurry that is no hurry but which carries

everything, even mountains, its own way.
A word will hurry homeward through, hurry carrying
its burden of sense, wriggling as it dashes off water,
every word water and air and idea.

At the broad foot of the low hill they bunched up,
your listeners, those who had seen others gathered
so gathered themselves up in a sheaf lightly bound
by what you were saying, your story or stories

and them the river, the lake, the body the water
forms standing. Or it went over their heads
like waterfowl, too lately left earth to set down yet,
going on over. The bread on your truck

warm from the morning baking, so it wasn’t just
words that caught the attention. Their faces shone
in ordinary light, not jeweled up like colored stones
in the waterfall’s sink, neither polished nor glimmering.

When you finally served, and the people spread out,
a line that grew longer as they talked among
themselves, you got your first unselfconscious smiles
from mouths chewing. “I don’t know,” one man said

as he bit into the butter and the crust, “I don’t know
nothing about that. But this. This bread is good.”