The Dessert

The porcelain bowl is deep as a well,

Whose glazed white rim holds the afternoon’s spell.

A clock ticks backward through syrup and smoke,

Where grandmother’s apron in lavender spoke.

Her hands were the weather, both patient and dry,

Plucking the summer right out of the sky.

She sliced through the suns, let the amber juice bleed,

Stripping the stone of its memory and seed.

Into the ceramic, the velvet globes fell,

Bathing in sugar and cardamom shell.

And over them tumbled the islands of dough,

Rising like clouds where the river runs slow.

Now in the dream-state of kitchen and noon,

The lattice-crust floats like a vanished-out moon.

The syrup is weeping through cracks in the crust,

Turning the shadows to cinnamon dust.

A fork cuts the quiet; the boundaries blur—

The peach is the parlor, the parlor is her.

We eat of the past from a spoon made of glass,

And watch through the table the centuries pass.

The orchard is burning in sweet, heavy fire,

A tongue of warm memory, a ghost of desire.

For time isn’t linear, straight to the tomb—

It bubbles and bakes in a porcelain womb.