Poetry |

“The Mothers”

The Mothers

 

 

Mrs. E., with the long limbs, took a daily swim

in our town’s lake. How funny she looked,

with her thin torso in black, and that bathing cap —

strange for lake swimming. We had magnificent

mothers who did such things: swim in the lake

 

until November, make pottery, paint landscapes,

sketch. Mrs. E. sketched us as we played on the dock

by the lake. I can still see her: bony elbows bent

above the water. The fathers were less interesting.

They worked: insurance, sales, law. They fade

 

with time while the mothers, magnificent, remain

vivid and forty-two. The mothers watched us,

and we watched them, my mother working clay,

Barbara’s mother, long at her easel, Jean’s mother,

swimming and sketching. She was magnificent,

 

and odd, wearing a bathing cap in a lake, her bony arms

churning round and round, even in November.

My mother’s pottery wheel, too, went round

and round, and Barbara’s mother, holding tight

to a steering wheel, died when she fell asleep

 

at the wheel. Was it November? She was tired

of being magnificently let down by her husband.

It took my mother thirty years to leave my father.

Mrs. E. was left by Mr. E. and almost didn’t recover.

It took swimming and sketching and finally law school

 

to pull her through. This was the ‘70s, when marriage

after marriage unraveled, when, during so many

long afternoons lakeside on the dock, Mrs. E.

passed us: bony legs, long torso, casebook closed,

cap on. November, yes, and still she would swim.

Contributor
Elizabeth Poliner

Elizabeth Poliner‘s books include the poetry collection, What You Know in Your Hands (David Robert Books, 2015), and the novel, As Close to Us as Breathing (Little, Brown & Co., 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Hopkins Review, Seneca Review, and other journals.

Posted in Poetry

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.