Mother's Girl

She remembers a mother waving from a train;
‘Don’t cry, silly girl,
Mother will come back very soon.’

As her life leaches out into still air
she watches tramps shuffle from the park,
knows envy’s vertigo.

She hears herself speak cliches: ‘. . . a nightmare’,
sees friends look reassured that dying
can be compared to anything familiar.

‘The children will remember me ugly.’
But she is bone-beautiful, a Giacometti,
filigree of veins in yellowed ivory.

She wears parrot colours;
she buys great bags of tulip bulbs,
learns a new Berlioz song, talks of a holiday.

While her husband whispers to the children
she turns the fragile vaulting of her back;
marzipan smile crumbles, tastes of quinine.

A stranger’s fingers clutch the furniture
—splinters, fat enough last month to draw
bravura from the piano, coax a baby into sleep.

Dressed for the ward-round she is actress
and audience, hair in a bright bandanna,
watching through ice, marionettes, miming.

Roused by a small hand from morphine dreaming
she murmurs, as she sails the summer night,
‘Mother will be better, very soon.’