for my mother

What words to fill the day? How to resist sentiment,
balancing dream and the recklessly blue sky?

Spring arrives with its allegro swell of trees, pollen,
a novel open on the kitchen bench, breakfast aromas.

Outside, the garden languors in laundry, agapanthus,
our swimming pool in need of chlorine turns emerald green

with insect wings, serrated jacaranda. What colour is truth?
I dip the soft sable in powder to dust away speckles,

cover shadows on my face, and yesterday's mascara.
Cleanse, tone, exfoliate. At all times, brush downwards.

I've disregarded my mother's beauty tips, her lessons
in permanence or grace. Her body slow, involuntary;

her eyes widened by Parkinson's, a fine tremor in the jaw
while the heart arranges, steady with belief and forgetting.

I take comfort in this. Mother, show me the other way back.
How the gravel is imprinted by the wind, by human steps.

Walk with me this evening, the sky crepuscular, rose-tinted,
the drifting scent of wild freesias like something strange,

half-known. You shuffle, sight weakened, wanting
to observe the fallen shingles, twigs, and the scarcity of birds.