The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler

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Purpura

When the poet wrote I lost my mother’s watch,
we knew she meant more than a timepiece.

To watch over the soft-skulled expulsive being
that is baby is a genre of love that must break

its own clock. In my first years, I slept little.
When I slept, I left my eyes’ garage doors open.

Poor mother thought baby awake, mother awake.
For months: staring contests in the half-dark,

calling each other’s bluff, falling in love as any
pair must—with desire and jealousy. Jostling

furniture in the psyche, heady hormonal rush.
When I lost my mother’s watch, I was thirteen.

The day, unaccountably bright. Fields of flora
bloomed under her skin as if she were a lavender

hat in Seurat’s famed painting. An ambulance
rolled its orange glass eye at her strange beauty.

For weeks, we waited for her body to lose its
artistic ambition. (Toxic drugs, confusion.)

Doctors asked: Who is President? What year is it?
Can you name your children? Purpura, the broken

blood vessels in her skin’s pointillist painting.
Some code or augury to read and remember.

I watched, thinking of Phoenicians finding
the world’s costliest color in the crushed bodies

of murex: vats of pulverized mollusks to trim
the general’s cloak, dye an emperor’s robe purple.

What a tyrant or daughter claims as her right,
calling it nature. The first empire is mother.

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