By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 2005

First week, every loaf a mystery.

The timer says thirty minutes
but the old baker shakes her head:
“Listen.”

What? To what?

The roar of gas, the fan’s rotation,
nothing that sounds like information.

She pulls out perfect gold
while his own emerge pale or charred,
the timer lying every time.

“You’re listening with your mind,” she says.
“The bread speaks to the body.”

Years pass.

His ears learn the alphabet of crust:
how moisture sings soprano as it leaves,
how the pitch drops half a tone when crumb sets.

The difference between
sourdough’s bright chatter
and rye’s bass rumble.

He throws away the timer,
trusts the conversation
where flame speaks to flour,
water giving up its ghost in whispers.

Three AM, the city slumbers
but the bakery hums its nocturnal mass.

Twelve ovens, each a choir:
the baguettes in sharp formation,
their steam-song almost military;
the brioche murmuring butter, confession-soft;
the pumpernickel in the bottom oven
droning its three-hour meditation.

He moves between them like a conductor,
knowing by the slightest pitch change
who needs turning, who needs steam,
who’s ready for the cooling rack.

No lights needed anymore: his ears see everything.

The sourdough shifts key, almost imperceptible,
like a singer’s breath before the final note.

His hand hovers at the oven door,
waiting for… there:
the crust contracts,
makes a sound like satisfaction,
like completion,
like a period at the end of a perfect sentence.

Now. Pull.

The loaf emerges singing its cooling song,
the crackle of “exactly right.”

“But what am I listening for?”

The apprentice, frustrated, presses her ear to the oven.

How to explain?
It’s like teaching someone to see blue
who’s never known color.

“Here,” he says, “forget the bread.
Listen to water boiling,
how it changes its story as it disappears.
Listen to your mother’s breathing when she sleeps.
Listen to wood in the fireplace
finding its way back to air.”

She thinks he’s lost it, gone mystic.

But weeks later she pulls him aside:
“I heard it. The bread stopped asking
and started telling.”

He nods, returns to his ovens
where twelve different stories rise in the dark.