Equinoctial

When we make love you follow a road across my breast and I remember the new jaggedly dark path

clear-cutting my mother’s right breast. I want to turn back more than anything I’ve wanted before this moment. Too many candles illuminate

windy midnight and I translate time where she is, the way we measure dogs’ years as seven times greater than our own —

every minute for her must become seven, she must stretch day and night as much as she can now. I can only imagine the burgundy sweater with stripes running level

left to right, her favourite pullover I bought for Christmas five years ago when breast cancer was the sun’s declination

we didn’t give a second glance to — these days the sweater’s tone-on-tone chenille stripes collapse diagonally across her cut-open chest.

The heart’s still there, still whole, I assure terrestrial darkness as you kiss where mine should respond tonight —

her heart hiding safe from the knife, the bloom that was cancering through her body, a body like mine during the equinox when we could be anywhere, days and nights

equal, and anything after a bottle of wine, but I’m the house I grew up in that can’t help

watching my mother bathe. Scars remind us keep going, don’t stop until, like the lake just outside, each latitudinal step is sand

with no rocks cutting. I wish I could love you — I wish she wore the burgundy sweater last week or today

for no reason and not because she’s afraid of stripes. I wish language were simpler and even more I wish the sweater lines went straight

across her chest the way they always did rather than, on her right side, down towards the earth. I want

her to be the sun’s crossing and you and I to be only

vernal seconds from where life is as we’ve known it

and better — water, a temperate climate, and enough

food for forever, but more than anything, I really want forever as the length of lovemaking’s celestial equator and how long

my mother is wearing the sweater she chooses.

—Lesley-Anne Bourne

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