In remembrance of my dear mother – and in acknowledgement of the complex work of mothering.
You came back
she said her hands
fluttering around her face abroad in the air
between us they are brittle wings unfolding in that scrubbed
corridor when she looks up from her wheelchair suddenly
ecstatic weeping you came back
from where? I come out of the day
flurried my own worn hands catching
hers stroking I will always
come back to sit close to walk quiet streets together
under plane trees their generous leaves
until I remember how I first left her flush
with the hubris of youth and how she stood on the nature strip
vulnerable trying not to touch me or hold me just asking
me to come home but I went anyway my face
turned resolutely in a different direction
it was years too many before
I looked back properly before I saw her a good person
living her life tending hydrangeas cradling
generations of children moving
like all of us through uncertainty and pleasure
toward the always unexpected dark fields this slow
drift into clouded water
I came back just
as she unmoored
this island this fragile
territory where I have always been
