Composing a Poem

My ninety year old mother broke her hip last spring. She is a modest woman, but one day she wanted to show me her scar. Why would she do that? And how could I describe it? How much history should I include - for instance, should I let the reader know she has Alzheimer's? I decided to open with the moment itself:

I'm taking everything off/ she announces, clawing at her clothes/

The verbs point to her loosened inhibitions and the quality of her thinking. This is no stripper. There is no playfulness in her act.

Moving to a description (a new scar gleams on her mended hip) that is stark and unsparing, the poem finds its identity in this line:

Where did this come from, where is it going?

I needed to make clear the loss of memory here, the shock that recurs each time a patient is confronted with what she has already grieved over.

The reader's attention now focuses on the scar, described with the brusque-sounding "cross-hatched" and its location on the ruins of the body.

A cross-hatched seam
in the center of a body's landslide.
A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing.

The reader follows as the old woman touches her scar like a blind person, and when the raised pattern of the scar is likened to "A railroad crossing pocked with stop-signs./A fire escape going down.// the poem demands the reader not flinch from the images of exit.

Ninety

I'm taking everything off
she announces, clawing at her clothes.
A new scar gleams on her mended hip.
Where did this come from, where is it going?

A cross-hatched seam
in the center of a body's landslide.
A cradle for children, a long-ago man; a broken wing.

She begins brailing her fingertip down
the red raised tracks. It's not what she expected.
A railroad crossing pocked with stopsigns.
A fire escape going down.