Portrait, and: Wading
Rent from DeepDyve- Portrait, and: Wading
Portrait
Her arms around me—child—
—George Oppen
Her arm around me, around my waist, holding her bare arm around meAs if I would fall off the map of her plaid soft lap,The sad look in her eyes bore into my own—the sad look and my peevish brother, and my hands pressed,Tightly into my wool skirt, its waistband itchy.
It is the girl who falls from her—the brother is the honorable branch,separate in the photograph, inconsolablein his tweed suit and knit vest,nothing to give her.
Wading
"What happened,"says little Sophie, nowdiapered with sand, water
dribbling from her sippycup into deeper water,the waves up to her waist [End Page 155]
and the sun disappearingfast. Her mother holds outa towel, once blue as the morning
horizon. Indeed, what happenedto the arcing sunsets, hulagirl palms, sequined tights
of beach, tide-pooledpiazzas? The indelibleKodak honeymoons, undated
black and whites in peelingleather albums, shovedin a bureau drawer. Sepia
bubbe and zayde, finger-waved aunts, stoopedmustached uncles, one
who pinched my thigh underthe table, then laughed,Atlantic City photos of Mom
and Dad in rolling chairs (laterwheelchairs in Miami), brothersand me as babies, my
offspring. Almost daily,digitals arrive of the latestgrandchild like this one,
knee deep in poundingtides, that quizzical lookI'd recognize anywhere. [End Page 156]
"Get up, Sophie girl, scoopthe years like sandin your pink fists, years
light as pinfeathers, the onesyour great-grandmother, after5,000 miles of steerage, singed
from thousands of chickens,providing the mother mulchfor your survival and mine by
selling chickens in a butchershop, cooking, cleaning, takingcare, leaving bitter tears
to the ocean. "Come, Sophie,take my hand, and we'll putthe photos in the albums, dry-eyed."
Paula Goldman's poetry book The Great Canopy won the Gival Poetry Award 2004. Her poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, the North American Review, and Cream City Review. She has won INKWELL's (Manhattanville College) poetry competition and the Louisiana Literature Award for poetry. Her poem "In the Musée d'Orsay" recently appeared in Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, published by Knopf.
