ManicDDaily

Last week, as part of the dVerse Poets Pub Poetics prompt, I posted a poem on the theme of “change,” which spoke of mothers stroking heads.  I was struck by how many commenters mentioned their memories of this experience.   This brought me to re-write an earlier poem (posted as a draft some time ago) about the same subject,  but with a slightly different take.

Buddha Hands

My mother was a demanding child,
“right now,” her favorite phrase, though
her father egged her on, she says, liking
to see her get a rise
out of her own mother, a tease.

“Terrible,” she says, and I picture
her father, whom I don’t truly remember,
as a man with bits and pieces
of her same face–
determined nose, staunch forehead,
bead eyes.

Yet, when she was tired, my mother goes on,
her mother (to whom she could be so ornery) would let her
put her head upon her lap, and, without mention of
the day’s spat, gently
wipe back her hair.

It felt so good,
my mother sighs, that now, nearly 90,
she sometimes wipes her own hair
back in just that way,
and, as she stands
before me, she palms
the grey strands from the still dark
widow’s peak, again
and again.

And I think, watching the path
of her palm,
how she used to do exactly
the same to me: how, in the back seat of a long drive,
where no tasks could be tended, my pointed
busy mother stroked my head.

I suddenly think  too
of Buddha hands,
a temple market in Mandalay,
where they were lined up–spare parts–
the loose stares of single eyes on the
shelf above–
tapered wooden fingers
flaked with gilt–

And I know, standing before that far counter,
and lying in the seat of that ghost car, that if ever
there were such a thing on this
Earth as freedom from suffering, freedom
from desire,
it could be found (for me at least), in that space
upon my forehead where my mother, her mother too,
ran their hands–
without grasping,
without clinging, without even
holding on.