Ama Codjoe's "Lotioning My Mother's Back"

Thoughts on touch.

Lotioning My Mother’s Back

Because she lives alone and my hands reach
where hers can’t, she asks of me this favor.

It is narrow and soft, my mother’s back.
When I massage in small circles, my mother

circles her own mother, who is made
of whatever makes a shadow thin

and ungraspable. She wants to touch her.
The bones under my mother’s skin—ribcage,

scapula, spine—feel like sharp winter rain.
Between the clouds, I see a patch of sky, glimpse

my aging body: moles like a flicker
of paint, undersides of half-covered breasts,

patches of eczema my fingers soothe
with heavy cream. Is this what laying on of hands

means? Once my mother touched a garment
and said, full of an awe full of sadness,

She touched this, her skin was inside of this.
My mother’s back shines

like the hands I wipe on the towel’s face.
Weren’t miracles always beginning this way?


from Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022)

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I first read this poem, as often happens for me, in a bookstore. I pulled Ama Codjoe’s latest book, Bluest Nude, off the shelf and opened it directly to this page. I leaned, as I often do, against a shelf facing the shelf where the book had once been. And I read the poem. And then I read it again.

I thought, while reading the poem, of my father, and a moment I might’ve described once or twice before in this newsletter. I thought of the day I went home with him after he had both hips replaced. I thought of kneeling on the floor and touching his feet, taking off his socks. I thought of how I remember noticing the length of his nails, the pale patches of skin dotting his flesh. I thought of the artifacts of his aging — the compression socks and the long-handled shoe remover. I thought of the bend of his back, how it seemed stuck at an angle closer to the ground than ever before. I thought of how quickly all of this had seemed to happen, how easily I could conjure up the memory of my father throwing his body into my bed while I napped, or reaching back while driving the long road to our grandmother’s and pinching the skin of my legs — always, he said, to help him stay awake.

In another of her poems that ruminates on desire, memory, and the self, Codjoe writes:

Tonight, I am alone in my tenderness.
There is nothing in my hand except a certain
grasping.

Today’s fills that hand. It poem offers tenderness in tandem. It offers tenderness as a salve for loneliness. It offers that oft-quoted line from Aracelis Girmay’s “The Black Maria”:

& so to tenderness I add my action.

It’s there in the poem’s opening lines:

Because she lives alone and my hands reach
where hers can’t, she asks of me this favor.

What a lovely opening. It introduces companionship and kinship and love. It reminds me of the final lines of Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens”:

I taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.

In this poem is that same bond — the bond of live things everywhere. Codjoe’s work — and it is the work of attentiveness and care — throughout the poem illuminates the ways in which that bond connects us not just with one another, but also with our memory, our grief, and our fear. And certainly our love. Notice these lines:

It is narrow and soft, my mother’s back.
When I massage in small circles, my mother

circles her own mother, who is made
of whatever makes a shadow thin

and ungraspable.

As Codjoe’s speaker engages in the literal act of massaging her mother’s back, which is an act of visceral and literal attention, her imaginative world is opened up into the world of grief and memory. She is not just massaging “[her] mother’s back,” she is — through the act of attentive care — allowing her mother to circle “her own mother,” to conjure up the generative lineage of family, the long line of love that makes us.

Later, Codjoe writes:

Between the clouds, I see a patch of sky, glimpse

my aging body: moles like a flicker
of paint, undersides of half-covered breasts,

patches of eczema my fingers soothe
with heavy cream.

Here, Codjoe illustrates that attention is also a kind of energy. In one moment, it is directed at the body, and then in the next, at “a patch of sky.” Soon, the speaker’s body and the mother’s body become one. It’s hard to know whose moles are whose, whose patches of eczema are whose. Even whose hands and whose fingers soothe whose skin. It’s a beautiful moment, a blur of tenderness and connection, an illustration of love as something constantly relational and generous — a feeling and action that, in its most attentive moment, is simply care, practiced together and at once.

A long time ago, I wrote and published an essay (edited by the wonderful Andrew Sargus Klein) about the experience of caring for my father in the aftermath of his surgery. In that fragmented essay, I wrote the following:

And so, at home, I wash my father’s body for the first time. The backs of his legs are bruised and his thighs are swollen near-double their size. They balloon, and the skin stretches translucent across the deep night of his blood pooling just beneath the surface. I sit on the floor as he stands, leaning on his walker. I begin with his feet, rinsing the washcloth in a pot made for cooking, wetting and warming the spaces between his toes. His legs are shaved for the surgery and the hair seems as if it will never grow back and his muscles tremble at the feeling of all this standing and he is wearing a long t-shirt and nothing else and I remember that I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, had stayed up dreaming of what might be his shame and how I might say something quiet yet reassuring. Become a kind of father to my father, but I would be lying if I told you that, sitting on the floor, I feel nothing but a sense of belonging. I did not journey to this place. I simply arrived. I cannot ever have known this love — I can only, simply, religiously, with burden and without, know it.

It’s funny, reading these words now, maybe over five years after they were first written. I read them now and they are true, but I also read them and realize that it took the act of writing to make sense of a moment I don’t know if I had ever attempted to make sense of. I don’t know if, in that moment of caring for my father, I thought of feeling “a sense of belonging,” but I do know that, in the act of writing, I made such a feeling true. And it is true now. It is true because I hold that memory dear, and, when I think of that moment, I think of how it felt as if my father’s body and my own had become closer to one, a moment where I, to use Codjoe’s words, glimpsed my own aging body, and attempted to belong there, in that place of care and kinship and unity, to see life not as something to be resisted or put off, but something to be lived.

What strikes me now, in thinking of that moment, is that it is one of the first times I ever touched my father for an extended period of time, or for any moment of time at all. Certainly it was the first time I touched him with an extended amount of care. What strikes me, too, is that such a moment was invited. Perhaps there is no greater feeling than the welcome feeling of touch, than the act of someone reaching out to you, asking for you to reach out to them. Perhaps this is true even more now, in a world of increasing distance and isolation.

We have these bodies that are bundles of nerves, and we have these hands full of fingers, and it must be true that so much of how we relate to one another is through these nerves and through these hands, which hold these fingers, which hold and touch so much. I recently watched an old episode of Succession where presidential candidate Gil Eavis shook the hand of a supporter on the street and was immediately offered hand sanitizer by Shiv, which he refused. It made me think about how one great sorrow of these past few years is the way in which touch, simple touch, has been made stranger and stranger. The sanitizer dispensers on every corner and in every store are both a welcome reminder of the availability of modern medicine and also a reminder of the way we have been taught to treat touch as something that must be immediately cleansed the moment after it happens, perhaps even subconsciously, without a thought — almost second nature. We are left with our memory of touch, yes, but we are also left with the memory of trying to erase that touch from our skin just seconds after. It is certainly a safe thing we must do, but it is also a sad thing. It is not the fault of individual people, but rather the fault of a prolonged systemic failure that led so many of us to make the difficult decision to prioritize our own well-being (and, in turn, our collective well-being) over the joy of unfettered touch. The love and care of it. I wonder about the damage of this. As often happens in life, it makes me more than just a little bit sad.

In his poem, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Ocean Vuong writes:

Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here?

Perhaps this is how we must learn to love again. Not just to touch, but to celebrate and validate our survival. If we trend toward the isolation brought upon by an increasingly compartmentalized and digitized and polarized world, then we lose the sense of touch. Not just the physical sense of it, but the real essence of it — the fundamental meaning. We lose the sense of touch as a way — as today’s poem reminds us — to love, to grieve, to remember, and to associate. We lose the sense of touch as a path to fellowship and companionship and kinship. We lose platonic and romantic love. The love of can you rub my back, and the love of can you touch me there, right there. Touch is at once sensation and metaphor. To touch and be touched is to feel and be felt. It is the act of having a body that feels in two places at once: upon the skin, and in the heart.

For some reason, today’s poem feels so far away from this world I witness. To read the poem is to long for the poem. It is to be grateful for such an act of care depicted, to be reminded of such care in your own life, and to long for the repetition of such care in the witnessed world, over and over again. I want to be reminded of softness rather than hardness. Of community rather than isolation. This week, I’ve been reading Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe, and was struck by a passage about a lesser-known existentialist, Gabriel Marcel. Bakewell writes, of Marcel:

He urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining “available” to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his essential existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls “crispation”: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — “as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him.”

I worry about that idea of “crispation” now. I feel it in myself as I get older. I feel myself hardening around my own potential for humility, holding too tightly to my incuriosity. It is hard, in this ever-quickly-moving world, to remain open to situations as they arise. They arise so frequently and with such velocity. It is hard, then, to think of today’s poem — about the slowness of love, the slowness of attention, the slowness of care, the slowness of the laying on of hands. We think miracles happen quickly, that they are a sudden thing. But maybe they are a slow thing. Maybe they are an act of love we forget about.

Often, as I ride the subway on the way to work in the morning, I witness people not wanting to be touched, people taking up more space than they need to so that they don’t have to be in the close vicinity of others. I do the opposite, but still with the same intention. I make myself small. I shirk away. When I allow myself to be present, when I try to love seeing instead of mere looking, I live for moments of common touch and common witness — the person I saw one morning who leaned close to a mother across from them who was reading aloud to her child on a crowded train — this moment of rapt intimacy and care — and said: “Your child is an angel.” The mother smiled and said: “She is; she really is.” No one had to witness anything. No one had to say a word. No one had to span the gap. But this is a shared world. We all live on it. We reach to touch each other across the gaps we do not understand, full of all we have yet to name.

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A Recurring Note:

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