Her Darning Needles

From an envelope old enough
to be my grandfather
my mildewed mother's thin figure
slips out. I scoop her from our floor.

She can be the mother of anyone
from that era, this city, the bourgeois,
except she wears my partial face.

Today I shall smell lavender
and rot everywhere, dust and petrichor,
and my fingers will become her
darning needles, sew
the house of the termites,
dead garden and overcast sky.