The sky has been dark
for many years.
My skin has become as damp
and pale as rice paper
and feels the way
mother’s used to before the drying sun
parched it out there in the fields.
Lately, when I touch my eyelids,
my hands react as if
I had just touched something
hot enough to burn.
My skin, aspirin colored,
tingles with migraine. Mother
has been massaging the left side of my face
especially in the evenings
when the pain flares up.
This morning
her breathing was graveled,
her voice gruff with affection
when I wheeled her into the bath.
She was in a good humor,
making jokes about her great breasts,
floating in the milky water
like two walruses,
flaccid and whiskered around the nipples.
I scrubbed them with a sour taste
in my mouth, thinking:
six children and an old man
have sucked from these brown nipples.
I was almost tender
when I came to the blue bruises
that freckle her body,
places where she has been injecting insulin
for thirty years. I soaped her slowly,
she sighed deeply, her eyes closed.
It seems it has always
been like this: the two of us
in this sunless room,
the splashing of the bathwater.
In the afternoons
when she has rested,
she prepares our ritual of tea and rice,
garnished with a shred of gingered fish,
a slice of pickled turnip,
a token for my white body.
We eat in the familiar silence.
She knows I am not to be trusted,
even now planning my escape.
As I toast to her health
with the tea she has poured,
a thousand cranes curtain the window,
fly up in a sudden breeze.
I really don't like this poem, it kind of played with my emotions and my head. I feel like I know what is going on, it’s just a loving daughter taking care of her mother when no one else will, none of the older sibling would come back and care for the elderly withering, wrinkly old woman. But further reading I realized that this old woman most likely drove her family away from her senile actions. The narrator, also known as the youngest daughter of six children, is taking her old mother to the bath to wash her old mother, she seems to be the only one of the six who has actually come back and taken care of their mother, even if she doesn’t like the tasks. In lines 17-26, the narrator talks about how her mother is laughing at the fact that her breasts float in the water, actions like this is probably the reason why none of the other children wanted to come back and take care of their aging mother: “She was in a good humor, making jokes about her great breasts floating in the milky water like two walruses". At first I thought it was just a poem about a loving younger daughter who is admiring her mother having fun in her old age, but at the end of the poem my view of this poem completely changes. She talks about how she is planning her escape from her situation, then she mentioned hey mothers good health and it makes me think that she is trying to sabotage her mother so she can escape taking care of her old mother: "She knows I am not to be trusted even now planning my escape. As I toast to her health with the tea she has poured, a thousand cranes curtain the window, fly up in a sudden breeze". The last part of those lines where it talks about the cranes in the breeze, I was a little confused, did this girl just kill her mother? Is that what the cranes symbolize?
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