In the market you pet a coffee-coloured poodle with tea-tinted eyes

practising that peculiarly boneless flop of his kind.

Liberated from love, love is everywhere but in the person of the beloved.

You look like a garden suggests a five-o’clock-shadow-passer-by.

Your mother lifts a white applique tablecloth

from a mainstreet Red Cross donation bin, thinking of grass stains

on her linen ensemble, more tautologically on her daughter’s flowered

emerald rayon. And would he like to be in the garden?

she wonders out loud. 
Moving deftly, she eschews righteous plaid & bossy

gingham for the softly-starchy embroidery, thinking of waxed canvas

laid over drawing room carpets at tea dances she never attended.

Her green cotton crotchet veil rests on her shoulders like the chainmail

of Crusaders, caught under pillbox hat cut from crocodile skin handbag.

She smells minty, your Mother he muses.

Doused in peppermint oil, burnished, her lack of sanctimony

She steals from charity 

is breathtaking. You park your arses on the

tablecloth. No dancing but

pear tart.