My Mother

My Mother

My Mother

She said the cornflake cake made her day,
she said a man cannot be blamed for being
unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his
extremities and it’s just the way his body
chemistry is. She said all sorts of things.

We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub
of maggots and a tub of sweetcorn, we saw
the walled garden and the old-fashioned library
in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a café
where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves

with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow
crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree,
the sky showing in purple triangles between
the branches. We looked in the window
of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful

all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was
pushing through the iced air and landing on us,
on our heads and our shoulders and the backs
of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover
from Wilko’s, a bath sheet and two Diet Cokes.

She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God
because she didn’t want to go to hell, although,
she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell
already, haven’t we. She said a woman should
know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.