Camel Hair Coat

I don’t want always to write about

the cleft in my heart, the blade turning.

My child who still, so deeply, resents me.

I believe my mother caused me damage, turned

away from my need, restrained my flourishing

as if she tight-bound me, wrists and ankles.

But so little of what I remember is solid.

Her camel hair coat, fluid when she walked

—it smelled of Chanel and was slippery-smooth

inside. She’d drape herself with the coat

afternoons when she rested on the chesterfield.

Then it was her woven shield, a golden-tan refuge

against us, her clamouring children; for maybe

twenty minutes she could simply shut her eyes.

If mothering is the thing in my life that most

pained me, how can it also have given

immeasurable lightness? Wire-trip

joy or flying in freeze-frame, trickle slaking

a parched throat. What do I have to say

about being a mother, about having a mother?

I’ve written of her, raw-boned and angular

when I was small, so hugs met the resistance

of hipbone or rib. How she shrank, a softer body

as she aged, the feel of her yield in my arms,

the finely-creased fabric of her cheeks. Home

from chaos after she died, din of arrangements

halfway across the country, I settled myself

to write in the sun on a wooden patio chair.

My girl was seven, wanted to climb me, sit

in my lap but I couldn’t hold her as I wrote,

and I wanted to write, needed to sink

into myself. So I pushed her away, let her

father lead her into other activities leave

your mother be. And the chasm between us

opened, my child unmothered as I’d been

dismantled, unpieced, only a week before.