Mother and Daughter at the Grand Hotel, Locarno, Switzerland
By Ellen Elder
I write about you all the time, I said aloud.
Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.
—Louise Glück, “Visitors from Abroad”
My daughter’s cellphone works
only on the veranda. A metronome
pulses the hours. Boats comb the lake. The Alps
multiply, the nurse calls to say
she’s on her way, or something upbeat.
Late nights in the pink attic
I hemmed my first pantsuit. A needle
here, a tuck there. Now my daughter
leans on an urn in a linen skirt.
Pillows succumb to arias.
A nurse appears, or has been here all along:
Sta comodo, Signora?
How comfortable can I be, minus T cells?
I kept her addresses in pencil,
memorized her boyfriends’ names, clipped
butterflies in her hair before she boarded
the plane. The bone breadth of marrow.
I left because the avenue was long.
Use the right lung today, Madam.
The windows are flung open.
Down the hall, visitors sip Prosecco.
Chin-chin, they chime.
Mamaw grew beefsteak tomatoes
in the back garden, cut them
into flowers laced with salt. Pulped
the fruit and spiked the juice
to gulp from Bohemian glass. Summers so hot
the porch rail burned our thighs
as boys licked sweat from our chins.
Magnolia petals dropped like eyelids.
Now I hallucinate beneath colonnades.
I used to study late, letting myself sleep
only after I looked up the same word twice.
Counting cigarettes, counting pages.
Now my body is a rag doll as my daughter rubs
baby oil on my heels
and paints my toenails. Waste of time, I tease.
Hold still, Mom. She waves a tiny bottle
of magenta as if it were a vial of poison:
It’s called Plumberry. Look, it’s beautiful.
She holds the polish up to the Italian light.
The living find it so easy to be satisfied.
She has my cheekbones, at least.
Someone offers us rose hip tea.
I thank him, but say I prefer whiskey.
My daughter answers another call.
She floats onto the veranda,
a sail between mountains.
The lake confesses in silver mirrors.
As a baby, my daughter nestled
in the lemon spoon of me. I was a nurse, after all.
Now she is all chill and translation
to my logarithm of charts and cells.
I tell her why I left.
She seems to take this, too, as reportage
that she types into her phone.
Tulips arrive by crate at the dock.
Shadows of buttered corn tickle the nose.
I ask my daughter what is on my forehead.
It’s my hand, she replies.
Oh, you mean your palm? I ask, she being the poet.
Okay then, she says. Call it my palm.
