Milk billows into Clay's coffee like submarine smoke from a fire in the earth. Clay wonders at the memory in his youth, when a boat burned in the night on a motionless lake and the fire rose upwards in actuality and poured downwards in a dream. Where is the memory?  Does something billow upwards from the milk invisibly?

Clay wonders, and soaks his buttered roll in gray coffee wondering, as the baker lifts the open book and reads the poem there.