[When I was 23, I had my first taste]
When I was 23, I had my first taste
of amaro, an Italian liqueur
that smelled just like my mother's make up.
Rosemary and sage, alcoholic heat
and fragrant wood burned through my nose. Its name
buzzed between my tongue and teeth, Erno Laszlo,
and the memory of my mother's minute frenzy
each morning came back to me:
smacking cream onto her face in the soft
light of the bathroom mirror, stretching
her mouth and eyes wide to pull her cheeks taut,
fingers sweeping over her nose
as juniper and lemon balm filled the air
and drifted to where I, like a ghost,
studied her from the tub. At night, she
washed her face with sea mud soap, an oily
black bar she'd hold under a steaming faucet
until she'd worked up a thick gray foam
to lather her brow, down her temples
and across her cheeks to the edge
of her bird-bone jaw, over and around
the airtight grimace of her lips,
her face a storm cloud, puffy and bare, drifting
above her body to bed. A dark concentration
passed over her face like a screen
for privately undoing, for unbecoming
someone to watch, as if to say this is how
you show yourself to someone you love.