Like Mother, Like Child

Every night she was home of her last several
decades of living, my mom carried with her
a gelid green Tupperware tube-glass of milk
up to bed: as iced as the freezer could make it –

so when she’d awake in two hours or so
through a slice of the night, she could take it,
and slake a deep thirst with its still-cold
white liquid – delight in the burst of whatever

delights me when I, too, arise from my slumber
to lumber across to the kitchen to find in
the fridge the gargantuan gallon of milk I insist
upon keeping to punctuate sleeping – to help

me derive a required and kindred effect. She
did it with délicatesse – while I do it more like
a delicatessen, open all night: I haul out
and gulp from a giant container; she sipped from

a slender tall cup. Like mother, like child, though,
in how we got up to go back to a similar well.
Neither of us had been nursed at a breast:
I wonder if that was a part of the spell.

.