When I sat for a moment in the bleachers <br />of the lower-school gym <br />to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter's kindergarten <br />climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit, <br />I remembered my sweet exasperated mother <br />and those shifting faces of injury <br />that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices, <br />playgrounds of monkey bars <br />and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily <br />in that garden of trauma behind her eyes. <br /> <br />Then Rachel's turn, <br />the smallest child in class, and up she went, legs twined <br />on the rope, ponytail swinging, fifteen, twenty, <br />twenty-five feet, the pink tendrils of her leotard <br />climbing without effort <br />until she'd cleared the lower rafters. <br />She looked down, then up, hanging in that balance <br />of pride and fear, <br /> then glancing <br />toward the bleachers to see if I watched, let go <br />her left hand, unworried by that boy <br />with the waffled skull, stiff and turning blue <br />under the belly of a horse, <br />or the Christmas Eve skater on Cagle's Lake, <br />her face a black plum <br />against the bottom of the ice.<br /><br />David Bottoms<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-daughter-at-the-gymnastics-party/
