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For thirty-one years, my mother tried not to miss her. Every week,
a little water or the trickle of a few ice cubes
dropped
in black earth. Years back, in the muck of Toronto, April,
my grandmother visited from Israel, left
a Christmas cactus
the vast beach of my mother’s Mediterranean
mother — oranges, mangoes, brown skin, hot
tempers, a bowl of warm milk for stray cats —
all packed inside this
tiny hammered copper vessel. For fifteen years after
my grandmother’s death, this house plant
kept moulting, blooming. Blooming, moulting, against the grain of North
American weather. Sometimes I caught my mother, comfortable
inside unfamiliar Canada, cheek pressed up against perennial
creeping stems, channelling her mother’s nature, enduring as intermittent
pink florets.
My mother noted its growing, shrivelling. She would pick
dead leaves, sometimes forget
water. It survived,
the care it was given. This plant. For thirty-one years, my mother
kept showing me.