Visitation
by Michael Waters
Dorothy Waters, 1927–2022
No visitors. Covid. I haven’t seen my mother in months,
But stand now on a grassy hump
Outside the locked-down memory care facility
Where she’s been propped in the window of her room,
Grotesquely lipsticked, thinning hair
Unbrushed, askew. I wave. How we adapt.
August dusk—the reddening sky my backdrop.
And what does my mother see? Her reflection, then me,
The son she bore seventy years ago,
As we merge once more.
Shimmering in glass, I’m within her, without.
I smile, not wanting to startle, to shout,
But it’s the double whammy of her skull
With its horrible rictus grin
Peering through translucent skin
That’s staring back, wanting in.
I’d thought I was done writing about my mother’s dementia when I completed the 25-poem sequence, “mother of flames,” included in Caw(BOA Editions, 2020), but since then a few more poems have insisted themselves. “Visitation” arrived post-Covid and after my mother’s death. The title might also suggest a haunting, experienced first by my mother, then later by me. I’m not sure if the poem serves as memento mori or as exorcism.
Michael Waters has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Sinnerman, Caw, and The Dean of Discipline. Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025 is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026. The Bicycle and the Soul: Prose on Poetry appeared from Tiger Bark Press in 2024. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems (Knopf, 2025), Border Lines: Poems of Migration, Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies, Contemporary American Poetry, and Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and Rolling Stone. Waters is the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, and New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He lives without a cell phone in Ocean, New Jersey.