Sharecropping

I’m wearing my mother’s sari, her blood group,
her osteo-arthritic knee.
We’ve voted
for different men, same governments.
In dreams she plays
among trees of rubber and betel palm outside a home in Myanmar
while I scamper down
dark service stairways
in Bombay buildings, sharp
with the smell of urine
and kesar agarbatti
smoking out of the breast pocket
of the seventh-floor madman.
She lusted after Dev Anand, I after Imran Khan.
On television
both still sport
headfuls of black hair.
She treads nimbly
across language.
I vowel every now and then into mouldering inertias.
I come undone with muzak
or a compliment. My mother’s made of sterner stuff.
Sowing the same dream in a different self -
the cussed logic
we both know
behind aeons of parenting.
We talk Buddhism,
Lata Mangeshkar, plot pedicures, late into the night,
and she watches me ancient peasant canny harvester, her eyes bright
with defeat
as I grow stealthily into her body.
Here it is then - the treachery
of middle age, of love.
It gets no closer than this, Mum.