Foreign Body

This is a poem on my other’s body,

I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one

who saved her braid of blue-black hair

in a drawer when I was little.

Meaning one I could lean against — 

against not in resistance. Fuzzy dress

of wuzzy one. Red lipstick one.

Kitchen one. Her one to me,

bad-ger bad-ger — 

or so I heard. The one body I write on

like Daddy’s blank studio wall

with my colored pencils.

About seeing her skin

as she bathed in the afternoon — 

was I five? It was summer.

Then today’s winter where again

I call that bath to mind.

I cannot leave her body alone.

Which is how I found Mother in the bath

escaping the heat of a 1950s house,

Father on a ladder with blowtorch

to scrape the paint off the outside.

•

badger badger

•

The sun in the suburbs

simmered the tar roof over our rooms

in the town where only wasps lived

inside paper cells beneath eaves and roots.

And they hurt very much, the wasps.

•

Now I am sixty. Sweet as dried papaya.

My hair, a bit tarnished,

my inmost, null.

Memory is failing away

as if an image shattered to shards then

recollected for a kaleidoscope:

I click the pieces into sharp arrangements — 

grouse, crow, craven

 — no, now, my own daughter turns sovereign