This Valentine’s Day, Deep Water celebrates bread (and pizza) and the warm gladness of breaking it with those we love. Dennis Camire’s “Upon Hearing that ‘Bread is the Way Sun Enters Our Body’ ” delights in whimsy and puns as it connects our humble shared foods with the light of the very cosmos.
Camire teaches writing at Central Maine Community College and lives in an A-frame in West Paris. The founder of the Portland Poet Laureate Program, his poems have appeared in Poetry East, Spoon River Review, Mid-American Review and other journals. His most recent book is “Combed by Crows,” from Deerbrook Editions.
Upon Hearing that “Bread is the Way Sun Enters Our Body”
By Dennis Camire
I feel this need to knead on my knees
And praise the daily “tran-sun-stantiation”
Of sun into whole grain via The Holy ghost
of yeast. And kudos to each pizza
now morphing into these solar systems
holding so many suns of pepperonis,
quarter moons of onions, and the light’s
epic expansion in the running cheese—
so, chewing a slice, we feel we’re ingesting
nothing less than the star-stuff of Helios.
And, after we caffeinate conversations,
With “the solar flare espied in the éclair”
Or “the northern lights espied in marbled rye”—
consider the sourdough soul’s own second rising
when musing how that same sun then beams through
The doughy body’s own celestial abode—
So our neurons feel the same heat
As those distant rings of Neptune do
And our membranes glow for the same reason
As any of the solar system’s marvelous moons;
And sun, bread, and body are now one
Grand string-laden-cosmos-in-expansion—
Heeding us, surely, to feel delight’s vitamin d
As your lover’s hand, say, alights and tans your thigh—
Or to know the solar radiation of a soul
So freely giving affection over to your blue being—
Which fathoms, now, how that sacred moment
Of silence before breaking open the loaf
is heightened by looking into one another’s eyes
And recognizing all the sunshine in disguise.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Upon Hearing that ‘Bread is the Way Sun Enters the Body,’ ” copyright @ 2017 by Dennis Camire. Reprinted from “Combed by Crows” (Deerbrook Editions, 2017), it appears by permission of the author.
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