Miss Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake, and: Elegy for a Flat, and: In Vitebsk There Lives a Cow

Miss Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake

She blends Virgin Island coconutwith butter and sugar; sieves flour—two cups—beats eggs with the milk of an Amherst cow,adds cream of tartar to make everything bloom.

In her white wrapper she stands at the window,lowers a basket of cake to the children below.Love's oven is warm, Miss Dickinson says,watching them eat from her spinster's room.

Elegy for a Flat

I fought, those mornings, with the zinc of the sky,fought to push it back under the edge of the world,to reclaim navy, star-pricked and moon-glowed.

The view of Blessington Street below us wasboth wonder and curse; city sirens wheened,we and the traffic beat our own rhythms.

I would soon wind down the stairs to the street,take a last glance at the Basin and its island willow,the redbricks opposite, rag-curtained and sad.

The road west stretched long ahead and I left,hauling your flat with me, its air, its contours, you.Still the east pulled on me like tide. It pulls still.

In Vitebsk There Lives a Cow

after Marc Chagall's I and the Village

whose rolling eye is as loving as a mother's.I go to her stall to breathe straw and dung,to place cornmeal bread and potato scrapsbetween her lips, feel her spit drip onto my palms.

I place my cheek on her flank, warm with grass,and hear her four stomachs pluck a tune;this is her song to me—a Vitebsk lullaby.

At the shtibel I give thanks, Hallelujah, I cryto a room small as prayer, and all heads turn.Across the village, in her stall, my cow lows in reply,while Mama pulls on her teats and hiss goes the bucket.