IN MY MOTHER’S CLOTHES

I walk in my mother's clothes on the street,

feel the cool sweat wider my arms soak her blouse

timidly: shy, damp flowers of my sweat on her blouse.

I let the white dust with its years of spit and sweet

wrapper, its agonising lifelessness, pass over me

in my mother's clothes, her rust and bright blue

and burnt orange, my mother's colours on my skin

in the dust, as if they belonged to me. I cheat people:

men; girls in high heels who pretend not to look

and fidget and sulk, girls lovely and empty with want

who I destroy with my Look of Elsewhere.

It's so easy to break girls, spoil their carefully planned

afternoons, their elaborate ploys to sweeten the air,

tantalise. Their eyes are bright with their love

for themselves, while I walk on the street

in my mother's clothes, laughing inside, relieved

of the burden of being what one wears, since in my

mother's clothes I am neither myself nor my mother.

In her inky silks, her cool green gardens of chiffon

that once filled me with thirst, I dream of elusiveness

(which is actually the dream of all girls in high heels

On the street, who I scorn!) Is it only one woman we all

want to be? The woman who opens her eyes and looks

at the mirror into the eyes of a child. The child who drifts

like a shadow through long summer afternoons when

everyone sleeps, the spindly creature of six who slips

onto her fingers her mother's gold rings, pulls on

an old cardigan that smells of sunlight and milk,

and conducts herself, drowsy with love, through rooms

with their curtains drawn against the honeyed light of June.

Does she always begin like this–seeking love by trying

to become the person whose love she seeks? Rolling up

the sleeves of her mother's cardigan and sitting with legs

dangling from high chair, her frail little shoulders stiff

with pride, her sisters jealous. Her mother slowly waking

to the calm evening light, laughing at the serious girl-clown

who is opening her eyes to look at the mirror into the eyes

of a woman, when all that there is of that unfathomable

grace she has taken with her and you are suddenly cold

in her cardigan.