She was the mother whose only
look at life before she married
was as a servant girl from
a dairy farm and in her 70’s
discovered sensuality in spicy novels
complaining to her children,
“Why didn’t anybody ever tell me
about this stuff?”
Who on arrival during her first visit
to a Caribbean island insisted
on being driven to a nude beach,
spent the afternoon wandering
in surprise and awe
through the unbound bodies
lounging along the sand
Who fell in love with the bottle
and drank herself to death
for lack of time to go back
to the beginnings of her life
knowing what she knew now
and who she might have been
swirling crazy and naked in the rain