First, a chapter on the hammock a mother’s skirt makes
for her daughters’ heads at dusk on Sundays
after each has come out of her bath, thinner-skinned
and raw in the palms, smelling like the chlorine in tap water,
lotioned from head to toe because the rest of the week
they’ll only do their faces and elbows and whatever is showing.
What is the smell that billows around their ears? Wet cotton?
Clean asphalt drying in springtime sun?
Yes, the sunlight is scented when white clove and clovers
grow with the grass. This is an old verse, the girls
like caterpillars falling out of trees when it’s barely warm:
even the inside of a quiet cement mixer would have been better
than cool pavement. They come with hair dripping ornaments
on their pajama backs. What about a verse
for the dismay of one daughter cutting her own bangs
into a bald spot, the hair put in her top drawer,
a thousand lashes in underwear waistbands, gaps
in the wood. A mother might cry trying to put a tail or braid
where she can’t. Or, the surprise of fungus on a scalp,
the other daughter treating her head like bubble wrap;
the ointments, the red comb left separate for her,
the hot water and Tide bath it must take after every use,
the tuft of hair left by a dermatologist’s razor for yet another
sample, tufts of hair that fit no tail or braid. A mother
can cry trying. There must also be a line about finding
curly hairs in pantyhose, the runs the girls made using tights
as blonde hair. Flesh-colored tights. Not their flesh but sufficient
for bombshells frolicking in carpet water: an old mattress
made jet ski, fluorescent lights something like a music video
shoot. We must have a verse about the grease under a mother’s
fingernails, how they become translucent after twisting two sets
of prickly rollers, the rollers’ inserts so similar to caterpillars
or a bottle’s scrubbing brush. Also a passage for the little braids
or buds in the baby girl’s hair, the hair that barely makes tail or braid.
A mother can cry.