Palinode

My mother is stalking cabbage moths
    with a tennis racket. She looks
most like herself when she tenses
    then swings over rows of kale and romaine
at the white specks floating through
    blue shadows. She is bisected
by the swaying frame, distanced
    by the poor resolution of the video
my sister just sent. Her left hand
    is bandaged: tendonitis from picking
caterpillars and eggs off the leaves
    with chopsticks. As if to prove
obsession is its own lineage
    I have spent hours checking the sun-
stunted shiso for iridescent beetles,
    bodies tufted with fine hairs
like the down on a dandelion seed,
    spent years wondering what it meant
to be her or her parents, uprooted,
    dispossessed. I can see so clearly
time’s possession in the way I speak—
    like her—the preference for detail,
for impossible control, how my skin
    has pocked and wrinkled, the gray
growing up my temples.