Elegy: I Pass by the Erotic Bakery

The way the tits of lemon meringue whorled

in the window that day

looked at first like breasts, then more like paws of my grandfather’s

clubfoot Siamese.

I want to believe that, after he died, the cat didn’t

gnaw off his face. I’ve heard it happens. I’d like to ask the pastry chef

if his vision of whipped

egg whites and sugar meant he saw, in a dream, that mangled paw

pressed to my grandfather’s chest.

I know my grandfather

died alone, with the TV on. I need to know

he kept his face that day, in the green armchair, that the channel

he chose as his heart slowed was not

televangelism, but a bird documentary: dark-eyed juncos

jilting the magnolias, fiercer than angels

flying south. I need to know the show’s voice-over

was pitched in the gauzy

timbre of lullaby—low and Latinate, Byzantine. Because

hearing, during death, is the last

faculty to go. And so, his last moments

were filled with the wing beat of juncos, and a calm,

omniscient voice: Fringilla nigra, ventre albo—black

finch, with a white belly. Languid in heat, the meringue

breasts cave a little, almost inscrutably

burnt brown at the side-seams, and at the tips. I lick

my lips, though I

won’t enter. I’m afraid

like Christ they’d turn

to flesh in my mouth.