Cathryn Essinger

Cathryn Essinger is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Apricot and the Moon, and Wings, Or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight? both from Dos Madres Press. My poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, New Directions anthologies, Ecotone, Calyx and other journals. My poems have been nominated for Pushcarts and “Best of the Net,” featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and reprinted in American Life in Poetry. I live in Troy, Ohio, where I raise Monarch butterflies.

Whistle

Try as I might, I never learned to whistle,
and so today when a cardinal calls from the hedge,
I open my Ipad and let it whistle back to him.

He answers, again and again, clear and ecstatic,
until my conscience bothers me. Who am I
to promise a happiness that isn’t mine to give?

But now, I remember my mother sitting on the back step
of a house in Salina, Kansas whistling to a cardinal
who is answering from the neighbor’s new TV antenna.

It is 1957, and she is wearing a red halter top, and pedal
pushers that break at her knee. The cardinal sings,
prettee, prettee, prettee, and she answers with a warble

that encourages him to sing again and again. I am ten,
and I know that she is beautiful, dark hair pulled away
from her face, red bow at her neck, back bare to the waist.

Soon Eisenhower will pass by in a motorcade, waving
the way he does in newsreels on TV, and I will stand
on the curb and wave back in a memory that flickers

now in black and white. Surely, the grass was green,
the house a frosted stucco, my shirt bright with stars,
but today all I remember is the cardinal and my mother

sitting with her arms around her knees, mouth pursed
to imitate the red bird’s happiness, and once again
prettee, prettee, repeated at the end of a summer’s day.

One Egg Cake

When the sewing machine choked on its own
bobbin and refused repair, or checkbooks
wouldn’t balance,

my mother would turn her hands to the air
and say, What we need now is a little
one egg cake,

words so familiar that we knew intuitively
they had nothing to do with baking.
The phrase was a trope

for all of those moments when others might
find you wanting or unprepared.
Only once did she explain

that when she was a girl, she took berries
to an elderly aunt who suggested
that her young niece

might step into the kitchen and “make us
a little one egg cake.” My mother,
only child, fond of music

and dancing, knew little about baking,
but the words stayed with her
for the rest of her life.

Through the years, many cakes passed
through her kitchen–angel foods
with seven minute icing,

rum cakes with pecans, and my father’s
favorite, a hickory nut cake with
penuche frosting, made

from his mother’s recipe and a secret
stash of hickory nuts. But no one
ever made a one egg cake.

Today, my mother is eating her favorite
gingerbread and trying to remember
my brother’s name.

Charles, she says, and then shakes her head.
No, that’s not right. George? she asks,
and an aide pats her on the arm–

That’s right, sweetie, I knew you would get it!
Mother rolls her eyes to the ceiling,
and then turns to me to ask,

Did I ever teach you to make a little one egg
cake? and in truth I can reply,
No, you never did