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