from a painting, Motherhood,
by my student Rebecca Westman

Green
and then colors
merging into the vanishing point
like Renaissance painting,
as if we mothers repeat ourselves
in our daughters, yes,
but with that profound change
which a wind springing up
suddenly brings to a creek.
The sun disappears and clouds hunker down
like sullenness. Or the break comes,
streaming light on maple and Indian plum.

Where have I got to?
Her spirit, my daughters, is not
anything but the swoop of a bird,
the way swallows will strike the June air,
evenings soon,
their mouths wide to it
for sustenance.

It's my own self disappearing.

The picture gives a feeling of more
and of lessening,
mountains piled on one another
into the distance, thinner and thinner blue.

In our attic, which is only an overhead space
filled with insulation,
I think I hear a bird which has broken the screening,
or is it still outside, a flicker maybe,
hammering away on treated wood
which will yield nothing?
Then silence again.

What's sure? Some days a child
seems at ease in both worlds, equally drawn,
and wouldn't mind slipping back.
To get a life going and to keep it,
a parent's got no choice but to be as close
as the rescuer placing his naked body heat
against the found one, shivering with hypothermia.

I'd helped her up the switchbacks,
in later hikes she outwalked me by half an hour,
but the last time I climbed to Victor Pass,
I went alone. Mt Angeles, its twisted rock uplifts,
and the lilies on the thatched lower slopes,
no less for it.

- Alice Derry