#MIDDLEBURY
Cake
Noah Eli Gordon
Look, you
want it
you devour it
and then, then
good as it was
you realize
it wasn’t
what you
exactly
wanted
what you
wanted
exactly was
wanting
About this poem
“Small as it is, this poem deals with the continually fleeting and bewildering conditions of desire, fulfillment, ambition, guilt and happiness. There’s some ambiguity in the ending, which can be read as both the lack of a direction or the direction of that which is lacking. Sometimes poets get to have their cake and eat it too.” – Noah Eli Gordon
About Noah Eli Gordon
Noah Eli Gordon is the author of “The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom” (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015). He teaches at the University of Colorado-Boulder and lives in Denver.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Noah Eli Gordon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
