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Contributor Series 3: Resolution and Resolve, Weathering


01.01.10 Posted in Contributor Series 3, today's words by

Contributor Series 3: Resolution and Resolve
Weathering
By Dee Thompson

My old Mazda slices through the wet cold morning world
Windshield wipers thwock thwock.
I hate driving in rain. Anxiety underlines everything.

The only beauty–tall pines fringing the ashy sky, a fit canopy
to my meditation cave.

Far west, my sister/friend prepares to journey east.

I know her journey.
Years ago I sped across the sky to my children.
Warehoused in orphan prisons, their faces engraved on my eyelids,
My only thought was Hold on, Mama’s coming.

Five years past, my daughter awoke to her first day as an American.
I cannot forget her–huge eyes, thick straw hair, white stick limbs,
mute behind her Russian language.
We lived in terror together, Mother and Daughter, bonded only
by paper and mutual longing.

Now we fit together like a pair of old shoes, comfortable from the long wearing,
separate, yet working together.

My son says he misses snow.
We live in a place of rain, a place of tiny winters and lush, expansive summers.

Studying for a science test, I explain ice wedging to him by recalling the potholes
everywhere in Kazakhstan.
I explain about rivers as he remembers the recent torrent in our backyard that
swept away our stone angel.
I explain tributaries by showing how fingers connect to hand.
We talk of weathering, of erosion, of alluvial plains, of steep canyons rising from ancient rivers.

I am not a baby! He says indignantly at breakfast. I’m thirteen.

You will always be my baby, even when you have gray hair and a pot belly. My baby.
I labored in planes and fell in snow for you.

Time and water change everything.

Dee Thompson’s poems Swimming in Darkness, How to Send Your Child to a New School, and Falling Island appeared at vox poetica in 2009.



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