She had teacup hands – china-white, and curved spindly
into a handle. Her eyelids, too, were teabags – always
closed, damp and heavy grey things lying across her eyes,
always leaking water as well.
I’d lift the bone-thin cups to her lips and hear her breathing,
irregular as rain.
She looked as though she’d been left in the sun.
She reminded me of the stalks of lavender I used to lay on
the dusty stone patio of a summer’s noon:
a fierce purple reduced and dried into a spider’s web grey.
Her veins formed a blue spider’s web under the tissue paper
of her skin. I followed it with my eyes when she was sleeping.
My mother would come in, take the tray away, tell me
in low tones to get some rest, but when I needed rest I’d lay
my head against her scratchy wool skirt and make up short
stories about her life.
I thought there would be poetry behind her eyelids,
and they spasmed as though remembering chapters of a novel
but I never got to hear the story because she died
before she could wake up.