D’s Bones

Seward, Alaska, 1954

Holding a .410/.22
over-and-under shotgun
across her knee,
my mother scans the peaks
above Resurrection River.
Her husband’s low camera
catches her right foot braced
on a snow bank. She wears
a blue kerchief, red and black
buffalo check jacket—a displaced
Tennessee girl, now forty,
with eleven year old son,
two years into a failing
marriage.
Here, she is
still
trying.

For years I’ve looked at this old print of my mother, seeing what I thought was her spirit. However, I let myself be fooled, caught by her jaunty posture, the tilt of the shotgun she rarely used, by her pose. More recently I have come to feel her desperation and the strength she quietly nurtured to do her best, all through her unexpected life. She lived through a long third marriage, died at 84.