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Before you were conceived I wanted you. Before you were born I loved you. Before you were here for an hour I would die for you. This is the miracle of life.
35/10
Brushing out my daughter's dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It's an old
story – the oldest we have on our planet –
the story of replacement.
Offspring
I tried to tell her:
This way the twig is bent.
Born of my trunk and strengthened by my roots,
You must stretch newgrown branches
Closer to the sun
Than I can reach.
I wanted to say:
Extend my self to that far atmosphere
Only my dreams allow.
But the twig broke,
And yesterday I saw her
Walking down an unfamiliar street,
Feet confident
Face slanted upward toward a threatening sky,
And
She was smiling
And she was
Her very free,
Her very individual,
Unpliable
Own
Our babies cried when we left them and we cry when they leave us. Echoes. Proud almost to arrogance then, we pushed them about in their carriages. Dutifully, wearily now, they push us about in our chairs.
Our children don't know us as we are now. Less do they know us as we were. Oh, how I wish they could have known us as we were. Do rou think they would recognize their young selves in our young selves? I wish they could have seen us in all our clumsiness and selfishness, which is so like their own clumsiness and selfishness right now. There's another echo for you.
We believed the fairy tales we told our children and we loved them beyond reason even when we were green and bungling about it. We were children loving our children. And that's who we are still.
'You're not like other children,' said my mother. 'And if you can't survive in this world, you had better make a world of your own.'
The eccentricities she described as mine were really her own. She was the one who hated going out. She was the one who couldn't live in the world she had been given. She longed for me to be free, and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.
Mothers are the most incisive philosophers.
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