My mother kneels at a pool
giving off its own life like a fantastic book.
As evening comes down, she sees me in the dark
at the margin looking for that one lost touch,
a kind of paraphrase of touch, and a message,
even fragment, that would open my hand,
even though I’m afraid of this primal vote
of life or limb, a stranger to the bridge.
We were not a close family,
scarce family at all, so nothing could go wrong,
but to make sure I left almost for ever.
I made my world clean as a seabird
in the wind. But there she is still connected
to herself in the pool, remembering
in endlessness a concentrated someone who
went backwards to be more accessible
to himself, and she turns and points at the real thing
which is not like the real thing at all,
and starts to speak, but before she can finish
everything becomes extra and what had been
like photography becomes a frame marked
Empty, and drowned faces flash like fish
while I rustle and become a room to my own applause,
dancing a Mr Bones waving the leg of a calf.
As light tilts, the whole sea sloshes over
and in the middle there she is still, my mother,
kneeling at a pool, scrying, reciting in a foreign language
I can’t even hear, but I think she’s saying
Let’s work together. It was then I knew she wasn’t
my mother. Old men don’t have mothers.
What would be the point?
The Point
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