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 uner 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