To a Mother I Know
I have seen you lift
the whole car of your pain
and hold it above your head
with trembling arms.
Seen you bench-press
that two-ton rusted hulk aloft
for eighteen years
so that your daughter
could play in the open air
creating whole worlds, innocent
of the superhuman effort
you were making
to keep the weight
off her. It happens all the time,
mothers do this, they hoist
the unbearable and they bear it,
but witnessing you achieve
the impossible, breaks
something in me. Not
my heart, but the ice sheath
around it. I think
of my own mother, of course,
and how valiant her effort
at keeping me apart
from her suffering, though you can’t
really keep a daughter apart,
we are too much entwined
in one long umbilicus
reaching down
the generations like tree vines.
And this is what’s
the matter, mater, mother
of all truths: the weight
of what we try to carry
for each other will never
be fully known.
*
Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net