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 voiceover
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.
drunken library 