Bed…

The Day Before I Was Born

Published by Seventh Quarry magazine, January 2010

My mother told me this. When she woke

it was already hot, beads of sweat clung

to her lower lip. My father bought her

a glass of juice and waited while she dressed

in a yellow slip, pinned her hair with tortoise-shell

combs.  Before breakfast they walked round

the indian, the name the villagers had given

the route that happened to pass

Vikram Seth’s cottage. My mother had hayfever,

the roads thinned with the heavy overhanging

clumps of cow-parsley. She wore the pale suede moccasins

she’d bought after reading Hiawatha, said she felt

so big that when they reached home she lay on

her back under the thatched verandah watching

the daylight moving clouds of dust into the hall, said

the light was clear and glassy green like looking up

from the bottom of a swimming pool to the

surface. Her name for me had been Maeve that day,

or Timothy, depending, but she’d have liked

Maeve. She wrote a shopping list as my father took

a photograph; she was laughing, trying to

write with a pen in her mouth, in one arm a

Siamese, in the other a Russian blue, says

perhaps everything was heightened by expectation

but she can still remember the sharp taste

of mango; the smell of the pencils she had

sharpened, the thin spirals of wood

curling in the sun. As it darkened towards

evening she saw the flash of the silver-tipped wings

of a wood owl, its low little hoots drifting

up from the edge of the moonlit valley.