Cartography

A body I thought would be mine forever

Is creasing, folding, changing shape;

Skin becoming mapped by lines that show

Each tendon ridge, each blue-veined tributary

In gentle, sprawling detail

Set against a backdrop of well-worn trails -  

Whorls of shortcuts and dead-ends -

A landscape I know so well but hardly recognise

Except sometimes, when in the kitchen on a winter morning

I catch my mother’s face, lit up in unexpected sunlight

And recognise the same quiet paths and walkways

Marked out and mapped there too.