Pearl

Every Thursday Pearl arrived in her old Model-A
with a satchel of lotions cremes and balms
to make over Mother.
Fresh from her bath, Mother lay on her ample belly
as Pearl pummelled, rubbed, massaged
the firm fleshy back of Mother
till it turned from sweaty peach to glistening crimson.

Then they move from her bed to the still-steamy bathroom, where
Mother bends over the basin as Pearl soaps her head; and the witness-child
stares at the face of her mother, upside-down
between brown curtains of hair.
Pearl, busy as any nurse or minister,
moves briskly from sink to chair,
applies the harsh-colored henna the child abhors.

Pearl seems to ignore the child’s disapproving frown; the child can’t catch her eye,
though Mother’s, luminous and green, are transfixed with pity as
she attends to Pearl’s inconsequent chatter;
beneath it, Mother and child
hear the drone of the terrible dirge that is never over,
the song of a fatally wounded Columbine
with her crazed painted smile:

Pearl, frantic with a croupy daughter, frightened of losing days
of work with Madame Patenaud, her termagent employer,
had forced her own little girl to swallow her medicine.

But what was hastily thrust between the child’s burning lips
was Lysol. The little girl abandoned her.
Pearl is alone forever.

Now this child imagines Pearl as hollow, a decorated funerary urn
set on an altar not to God but Beauty.
Pearl paints Mother’s toenails propped on the sink.
Why hadn’t she died?
But perhaps she had and it’s a ghost of her
who pearls these fingers, toes; then later paces
the nightmares of the child. Desolation and desertion!
Pearl’s ivory face averted as the child begs mercy
from the bleak desert of dream.

But now, swathed like a houri in a heavy towel,
Mother leans back in her chair
while Pearl stirs magic in a jar: brown sticky unguent.
Pearl’s mentor, Madame Patenaud, in long-ago Los Angeles
was a genius with cremes and lotions; even today
Pearl’s voice hushes with awe
as she applies the secret formula reeking of tar
(the child’s nose never forgets), a potion which,
faithfully used, confers eternal youth.

She would be Ponce de Leon to Pearl’s elixir,
eternally youthful Mama, fat and beautiful,
transfixed
as Time is cheated; Pearl swabs her face, dabs it with ice.
They study her reflection, Pearl nods
with satisfaction; only a tiny frown
as Pearl tweezes a single hair from Mother’s arching brows:
a Japanese master gardener
who plucks one needle from a famous pine.

The child senses the bond between these two,
the tragic and the laughing Muse-she, bare-faced now,
an empty canvas on which Pearl plies her skills
except that it is a speaking canvas, critical
of its creator, who reinvents her look
as the child is shut out.

She who grimaces hideously in the mirror,
puffing her cheeks or putting out her tongue,
is stuck, she fears forever, with this pudding oval
which no hand molds.
Oh, she will cartoon herself with bloody lipstick
stolen from Mama,
but scorns her own lack of skill-presses Mother and Pearl
to be let in.

As we grow older, Mother, you close the distances
between us, with kisses, dresses, tiny conspiracies.
We cuddle beneath one comforter, serene and mild.
But Pearl, O Pearl, I would have been your heart’s fulfillment.
I was your prodigy, your dream of life.
I was your murdered child.