Joan McMillan
Nothing returns her to me
like this scent. The woman on the bottle’s different
than in childhood: a sorceress with wild red hair,
leafy branches over her head like torches.
My mother’s bottle was utilitarian, round glass,
with a line drawing on the label of a stern Victorian profile,
but the fragrance is the same as the one
that filled my room when she poured just a little
into her cupped hand, to stroke on my skin during illness:
wet earth, roots, autumn woods steeped in rain and shadow.
How is it that I grew away from her?
How is it that she closed her eyes
against this world, her hands stilled, never to quench
the fever of my grief with any elixir,
her bones fragile now, and white as a handful of dry twigs
broken and scattered for divination,
their ciphers a hoarded message waiting
in the coffers of silence and the absolute dark.