Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

I was eight when I looked through a keyhole

and saw my mother in the drawing room in her 

hibiscus silk sari, her fingers slender around a glass of iced cola,

and I grew suddenly shy for not having seen her before. 

I knew her well, of course, serene undulation of blue mulmul, 

wrist serrated by thin gold bangle, gentle convexity of mole on upper right arm,

and her high arched feet, better than I knew myself. 

And I knew her voice like running water, ice cubes in cola. 

But through the keyhole at the grown-up party,

she was no longer geography. 

She seemed to know how to incline her neck, just when to sip her swirly drink,

and she understood the language of baritone voices and lacquered nails 

and words like emergency. I could have watched her all night. 

And that’s how I discovered that keyholes always reveal more than doorways,

that a chink in a wall is all you need to tumble into a parallel universe. 

That mothers are women.