WS Merwin - Eight Cakes lyrics

At a given moment in your life eight cakes are being eaten. The first is in the very country you are in. It is a blood-colored cupcake. It is being raised from a box, on a train, by someone who is used, at last, to your absence. The second is in another country. It is stone-colored, but iced with nuts and cherries. It is being eaten in the dining room small as an infant greenhouse, though the meals in that family are taken in the unlit kitchen. Plants are standing everywhere, veiling the huge old radio and the piles of magazines. The cake is the first admission of pleasure in that house after the most recent of many d**hs. You too have eaten cake from that table but you will not sit down in that room again. The third is in a third country. It is pale yellow. It is stale. The mice are eating it, in the light of dawn, far above the wide silent water, while in the next room someone long close to you dreams again and again that you are lost. The fourth is white. Two pieces of it are sitting on a marble table in a crowded tea-room and have not yet been touched by two greedy old ladies, both of whom you have known, who have not seen each other for years. Neither of them will give you a thought. Why should they? The fifth is in the same country as the second. It is green. It is being eaten by an official whose face you cannot see. He is wearing a flat tie-clasp and no jacket over his nylon shirt. Beside the plate on his desk are documents relating unfavorably to you. He does not like the cake. The sixth is chocolate. It is being eaten by a child sitting in a chair in which you learned the meaning of “venereal.” But the child and you will never meet, and the chair, the like Bourbons, learned nothing. The seventh is pink. You are eating it yourself out of politeness and boredom, among people who have provided it themselves and whom you will almost certainly never see again. The eighth is dark purple. The hand that is cutting it drops the knife, and the hand's owner then thinks of you.