Prayer 48

for Asja

In predawn dark, a rat falling from a rafter is a dollop,

wind a whir, and suddenly I'm remembering my mother

teaching me to bake her hot water sponge cake.

How we whipped the egg whites with the electric mixer

until stiff peaks formed. How she warned me not to allow

a single thread of yolk to taint the white, or the cake

would fail. To fold white into yolk-sugar-flour was slow,

patient. She let me carve a wedge with the rubber spatula,

drop it to the batter's surface, then lift from the bowl's bottom

up and over the dollop, turning it in. Warned me

never to beat or mix or even stir—the cake would fall.

Once, dinking around, I stuck a wooden spoon into

the still-whirring beaters, bent the metal, splintered

the spoon into the batter. Once I cut her grandmother's precious

lace for a doll's clothes, and she cried, the savaged pieces

draped across her wrists. So many times I tried to shove

my peasant feet into her dainty pumps, hand into her evening

gloves. One spoon at a time, that first thin layer drawn across

the airy white forming a little hill. Folding only

just enough. The batter growing lighter by increments.

It was mostly space we folded in, taming down

the cloy. It was never so good as then, licked off

the finer, the cake itself, to me, disappointing, layers

smeared with homemade jam, topped with a stiff merengue.

Never so good as then, her instructing, trying to domesticate

my impertinence, teach me a little grace, me resisting,

the sweet on my tongue dissolving so easily

in that state of matter. Never so good as straight from

the Pyrex bowl. Never so gentle as the slide of batter

into an angel food pan. The rest up to her, what she

created from the baked version, brown on top and bottom.

Here I am, decades later sitting under the halogen

of a full moon, and that moment, which was many

folded into one, is so pure and specific, the sugar sharp

on my tongue, the spatula pushing as if through

an undertow. My mother taught me to fold. Never so

sweet as now. We were incorporating lightness

into a deep bowl. As some bird—probably an owl

out hunting—chacks its was across the lawn,

sounding like a key chain, and now the garden sprinkler

comes on, so I know it's 6:00 a.m. There's the first hint

of dawn slow-dissolving one more night. This is a fifty-

year-old love. It's heavy, so I fold in moonlight, the sound

of water spattered on leaves. Dim stars, bright moon—

our lives. The cake imperfect, but finished.

—12.17.2013

Source: Prayer in Wind (Boreal Books, 2015)

Poems About Motherhood