The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels <br />With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. <br />Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun <br />And saying that when she was first married <br />She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. <br />(It is empty now, the roof has fallen <br />But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods <br />Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; <br />The place is now more solitary than ever before.) <br />"When I was nursing my second baby <br />My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake <br />And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast <br />Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. <br />Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, <br />Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. <br />I had more joy from that than from the others." <br />Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road <br />With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. <br />She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin <br />Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, <br />I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, <br />The stir of the world, the music of the mountain. <br /> <br /> <br />Submitted by Holt<br /><br />Robinson Jeffers<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fawn-s-foster-mother/
