My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party
When I sat for a moment in the bleachers
of the lower-school gym
to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’ s kindergarten
climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit,
I remembered my sweet exasperated mother
and those shifting faces of injury
that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices,
playgrounds of monkey bars
and trampolines, those wilted children sprouting daily
in that garden of trauma behind her eyes.