I gotta buy a cake for my kid.
Some kind of ice cream jamboree from J.P. Licks down in West Roxbury.
She’s gonna be 20.
When you are a parent, you just keep buying cakes for your kids.
You could be 80 and she’s 60
and still you head on out to Carvel in New Rochelle, Webster Avenue,
and get her the Fudgie the Whale 12-inch
even if you have diabetes and two busted kneecaps.
It never goes away—
buying cakes.
I want to buy a cake for the country,
not like I am the Big Papa of politics
or even the knight of agricultural futures for the less fortunate,
it’s just a way of noticing time.
Last night after watching Amy Adams in Arrival
and noticing time as an elliptical melody that keeps surrounding its center
only to move its harmonic vortex a little to the left
I went outside and looked at the moon.
It looked like a chocolate cake melting through the clouds.
It looked like my daughter getting older
and floating across the sky in a Chagall dream.
After last night I learned that Chagall always put goats in his paintings.
It took me long enough to figure this out even though I had known it all along.
That’s what we do with our paintings.
We make them into cakes for countries and flowers and children
and then we try and destroy time.
Matthew Lippman is the author of nine poetry collections. His next collection, Cry Baby Cry, will be published by Four Way Books in 2027.
