The Mother/Child Papers: With a new preface by the author

The Change

‹53› The Change Happening now! it is happening now! even while, after these grey March weeks— when every Saturday you drive out of town into the country to take your daughter to her riding lesson and along the thin curving road you peer into the brown stuff— still tangled, bare, nothing beginning. Nothing beginning, the mud, the vines, the corpse-like trees and their floor of sodden leaves unaltered, oh, you would like to heave the steering wheel from its socket or tear your own heart out, exasperated— that it should freeze and thaw, then freeze again, and that no buds have burst, sticky, deep red, from their twigs — You want to say it to your daughter. You want to tell her also how the grey beeches, ashes and oaks here on Cherry Hill Road on the way to her riding school feel the same, although they cannot rip themselves up by the roots, or run about raving, or take any action whatever, and are almost dead with their wish to be alive, ‹54› to suck water, to send force through their fibers and to change! to change! Your daughter, surly, unconversational, a house locking its doors against you, pulls away when you touch her shoulder, looks out the window. You are too old. You remind her of frozen mud. Nevertheless it is happening, the planet is swimming toward the sun like a woman with naked breasts. She cannot help it. Can you sense, under the ground, the great melting? ...