Poetry Thursday

Undertow

I don’t know where
my mother lived before she died,

with a blue lamp,
the what-not shelf,
a cartwheel of snapshots
out of sequence and filled
with strangers, daddy,
who packed an eclair
in my lunch box each morning

with unsweetened tea
in a thermos, to
promote independence.

A chair forgets
the shape of its owner, in time
a hand print fades, painted
over in Williamsburg Blue

there is a color
no one remembers
the sibilant chant, names
rustling through the willows.

In this foreign land,
I have forgotten the tune.