halves of nothing at the center of time
Apr. 19th, 2026 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
musesfoolI realize I never followed up on the vanilla cupcakes and they did stay moist for 4 days in an airtight container and didn't get that weird texture where you can tell they're going bad, nor did they dry out, so. A++ on the hot milk method. So I am making them today, as well as my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe (it is actually a cake recipe but it makes 40 mini cupcakes as written) and then tomorrow I will make whipped ganache for the vanilla and vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream for the chocolate, and bring them to work on Tuesday, since one of my attorneys is pregnant, and this is likely the last time she'll be in the office with us until the fall. She was all, "no need to make a fuss!" but my boss was like, "Cupakes? :D :D :D" so of course, I was also like, "Cupcakes! :D :D :D"
*
Today's poem:
Mother, Kitchen
By Ouyang Jianghe
(Translated from the Chinese by Austin Woerner )
Where the immemorial and the instant meet, opening and distance appear.
Through the opening: a door, crack of light.
Behind the door, a kitchen.
Where the knife rises and falls, clouds gather, disperse.
A lightspeed joining of life and death, cut
in two: halves of a sun, of slowness.
Halves of a turnip.
A mother in the kitchen, a lifetime of cuts.
A cabbage cut into mountains and rivers,
a fish, cut along its leaping curves,
laid on the table
still yearning for the pond.
Summer's tofu
cut into premonitions of snow.
A potato listens to the onion-counterpoint
of the knife, dropping petals at its strokes:
self and thing, halves of nothing
at the center of time.
Where gone and here meet, the knife rises, falls.
But this mother is not holding a knife.
What she has been given is not a knife
but a few fallen leaves.
The fish leaps over the blade from the sea
to the stars. The table is in the sky now,
the market has been crammed into the refrigerator,
and she cannot open cold time.
***
*
Today's poem:
Mother, Kitchen
By Ouyang Jianghe
(Translated from the Chinese by Austin Woerner )
Where the immemorial and the instant meet, opening and distance appear.
Through the opening: a door, crack of light.
Behind the door, a kitchen.
Where the knife rises and falls, clouds gather, disperse.
A lightspeed joining of life and death, cut
in two: halves of a sun, of slowness.
Halves of a turnip.
A mother in the kitchen, a lifetime of cuts.
A cabbage cut into mountains and rivers,
a fish, cut along its leaping curves,
laid on the table
still yearning for the pond.
Summer's tofu
cut into premonitions of snow.
A potato listens to the onion-counterpoint
of the knife, dropping petals at its strokes:
self and thing, halves of nothing
at the center of time.
Where gone and here meet, the knife rises, falls.
But this mother is not holding a knife.
What she has been given is not a knife
but a few fallen leaves.
The fish leaps over the blade from the sea
to the stars. The table is in the sky now,
the market has been crammed into the refrigerator,
and she cannot open cold time.
***
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