She’d stand in bowls of brine on summer shores, teaching me 

to hunt the smooth lipped mussel bound  

by cobalt shell, how to pry things open 

how to recognise inside the bland smoothness of rock 

the braille of the Jurassic; ammonite, trilobite, belemnites 

Formed like her coiled plait 

with its tendrils of bladderwrack washing against 

the collar of her blue cotton dress. She taught me 

 

the hidden millennia, how to speak of hard  

things. The violence of opening, that is 

what it is to be a mother, to be pried open  

to reveal heritage 

 

But now she cannot speak  

of the sea but of silence in the rock 

Ridged whorls closing ever closer 

to the centre, scented of deep sea 

brine, time, her fingers clawed and arthritic 

Their prying done. My mother 

 

who is not my mother is enclosed within  

a hard place, which is not my mother  

but an ossified form. Whose dressing gown still hangs 

in the closet, whose feet still nestle in her mauve slippers, who lives 

in the synapses of my memory of her 

teaching me the names  

ammonite, trilobite, belemnites  

 

Like benedictions  

 

Only later did I realise these were not 

the creatures themselves but the impressions 

of the softness of what was. Imprints  

of their absence. Today I pry  

 

the mussel, smash the rock, tear 

the dressing gown pocket. Screaming 

this is what you were  

But she is the husk of what was 

an impression. She is the rock  

of what once was. And even inside  

the softness is time swept to an absence