Plum Cake by Diane Mehta

Plum Cake

 

I’d make a plum cake when she died,

a lamentation grief-bake, Kaddish through blood-recipe,

all of its colors shrieking at me; a sweet take on her love.

I gaze at the street. Tree branches out front are tangled,

my floor is slanted, my house-cage is so small and dark

for all the summits, slopes, and swamps of feeling.

 

I am not to be purple-plum-decided in any still-life of grief

or reminiscence, no waferlike religious feeling, never—

she will never be human again. I knew I wouldn’t make it.

 

Italian plums are sweetest. I should find them in a market

when days are longer; fruit-of-aging, gift-of-goodness.

A friend who lost a friend and made the cake said plum

six times in one paragraph, so full of yearning are our phrases.

Snow-bright is her hair on the bed, knobby knuckle-skin

folded on her chest. She’d be delighted to celebrate her death.

 

I love that, she’d say happily about the plum-cake wake.

Plums pooled around the cake-slab in the photograph,

bloody and marvellous. Skylight took her in. I couldn’t make it.