My mother was a cyclops

My mother was a cyclops 

which made her hard to love 

she had the patina of humanity 

but the hues

of light and darkness

which billowed and susurrated just behind her eyes

belonged in the skull 

of a lycanthrope 

She could touch the sky with her fingertips 

and navigate between the architectural plasticity of her children's minds 

as if she were an egret 

but still her hands remained 

like a crystalline lattice 

around our throats

I lay with her 

amongst her sun bleached bones

on the day before she died 

and traced around her body 

with a jagged stick of charcoal 

At first she was the shape of a fish

washed ashore screaming 

then she was the shape of my mouth 

on the night my father fell

and the next day 

when she forgot how to breath

she became the shape of perpetuity