Mother And Daughter And Words Of Love - Lamont Palmer
  
'Words are everything else in the world.' - Wallace Stevens

l
The scene is this: mother, daughter, a child's book, and a world.
This doctor's office of languishing onlookers,
appear to know the facile words of the book,
and the milky words of a protected childhood.
They have cupped this tiny face, the onlooking strangers,
rolling their eyes over the restorative picture.
The mother reads from the little book,
holding the book in front of her daughter's eyes,
girlish eyes, round like ambivalent worlds,
perusing the pages, an ink of fantasy,
as there was knowledge in the book,
and knowledge in her mother's hands,
which pressed a warm print into the colored cover,
as the girl is baptized amid the throes of phrases.
Children and books are joined at one
by maternal eyes, rising from the isolation
of mothers, daughters and curious strangers.

Yet the eyes of the this young one stared everywhere
except at the indifferent book - stared at the faces of the others
waiting like wan plants under a wan sky.
No simple text held magic for young eyes
titillated by the faces of people whose blank, older faces
she would some day mimic,
forty springs, forty Aprils from this day
marked by fairy tale words,
and a mother's literate hands,
wringing out of a small book, language and love.

ll
This is the world. Mother reading, daughter not looking,
as someday daughter will read
and mother will not look,
when mother's gaze has perused the ceilings,
has laid on white stucco her sweet sight,
has made the attempt at grasping, a glowing try,
in days of strange homes and strange embraces,
in days when tears strive to be less than tears,
in the days when families will dwindle to memory.
There is language and there is love,
and there are lives, a continuum
imitating the two. They are the two. They are their lives.
And life does its selective reversals,
does its switch from strong hand to weak hand,
and the navigator sees only immutable storms,
gray on the water, subtle on sand, as it sleeps.
Daughter becomes the mother, mother becomes the daughter;
they are reversed, yet still a unit of love.
Within the psalmic present, balance lives:
this is a mother/daughter union of words;
words deeply assertive as the natural sun,
from literary mouths where the nouns are gold,
and a voyeuristic world, watching the two, warmly joined,
and lost in the sound of recitation.

Lamont Palmer
2007.8월 Poemhunter의 Top 500-127