The Crescent


My stick of lipsalve is worn away
into the same curved crescent
that was the first thing I noticed
about my mother’s lipstick.
It marked the pressure of her existence
upon the world of matter.
 
Imagine the grim fixity
of my stare, watching her smear
the vivid grease across her lips
from a tube shiny as a bullet.
The way she smoothed it
with the tip of a little finger
(the tinge it left, even after
washing her hands, explained
the name ‘pinky’) and her pointed tongue
licking out like a kitten’s,
fascinated, irritated.
 
It was part of the mystery of
brassieres and compacts and handbags
that meant being grown-up. I thought
my own heels would have to grow
a sort of spur to squeeze right down
the narrow hollow inside high-heels.
 
Now I am calmer, and no longer
paint my lips except with this,
pale as a koshered carcass
drained of blood in salty water
or a memorial candle,
wax congealed down one side,
as though it stood in the wind
that blows from the past, flame
reflected like a crescent
moon against a cloud
in the pool of molten light.

I carry the sign of the moon
and my mother, a talisman
in a small plastic tube
in my handbag, a holy relic
melted by believers’
kisses, and every time
I smooth my lips with the unguent
I feel them pout and widen
in the eternal smile
of her survival through me,
feel her mouth on mine.

From The Knot, Hutchinson, London 1990 & Selected Poems, Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1995.