Mother and Daughter at the Grand Hotel,…

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.
—Louise Glück, “Visitors from Abroad”

My daughter’s cellphone works

only on the veranda. A metronome

pulses the hours. Boats comb the lake. The Alps

multiply, the nurse calls to say

she’s on her way, or something upbeat.

Late nights in the pink attic

I hemmed my first pantsuit. A needle

here, a tuck there. Now my daughter

leans on an urn in a linen skirt.

Pillows succumb to arias.

A nurse appears, or has been here all along:

Sta comodo, Signora?

How comfortable can I be, minus T cells?

I kept her addresses in pencil,

memorized her boyfriends’ names, clipped

butterflies in her hair before she boarded

the plane. The bone breadth of marrow.

I left because the avenue was long.

Use the right lung today, Madam.

The windows are flung open.

Down the hall, visitors sip Prosecco.

Chin-chin, they chime.

Mamaw grew beefsteak tomatoes

in the back garden, cut them

into flowers laced with salt. Pulped

the fruit and spiked the juice

to gulp from Bohemian glass. Summers so hot

the porch rail burned our thighs

as boys licked sweat from our chins.

Magnolia petals dropped like eyelids.

Now I hallucinate beneath colonnades.

I used to study late, letting myself sleep

only after I looked up the same word twice.

Counting cigarettes, counting pages.

Now my body is a rag doll as my daughter rubs

baby oil on my heels

and paints my toenails. Waste of time, I tease.

Hold still, Mom. She waves a tiny bottle

of magenta as if it were a vial of poison:

It’s called Plumberry. Look, it’s beautiful.

She holds the polish up to the Italian light.

The living find it so easy to be satisfied.

She has my cheekbones, at least.

Someone offers us rose hip tea.

I thank him, but say I prefer whiskey.

My daughter answers another call.

She floats onto the veranda,

a sail between mountains.

The lake confesses in silver mirrors.

As a baby, my daughter nestled

in the lemon spoon of me. I was a nurse, after all.

Now she is all chill and translation

to my logarithm of charts and cells.

I tell her why I left.

She seems to take this, too, as reportage

that she types into her phone.

Tulips arrive by crate at the dock.

Shadows of buttered corn tickle the nose.

I ask my daughter what is on my forehead.

It’s my hand, she replies.

Oh, you mean your palm? I ask, she being the poet.

Okay then, she says. Call it my palm.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2024)

Mother and Daughter at the Grand Hotel, Locarno, Switzerland