Loom

My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam, 
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always 
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do, 
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair 
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard. 
Finds exactly where the hickory trees start themselves
against the yard. And shows me on the photograph 
which is only one of several, where though again 
they did not touch each other, standing on some shore, 
her mothers’ shadows touch each other. 
She shows it to me now to soothe me. As if soon 
it will be that blue in the air. Soon is what 
she thinks with. What she runs 
the edge of her thumb, her index finger over. 

Copyright © 2024 by Bradley Trumpfheller. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 5, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“My mom was adopted and raised by two lesbians in Alabama during the 1970s. She did not know her mothers were lesbians until she was a teenager. Leaving behind very little in the way of traditional archives, we keep turning and turning to the past as well as the future, seeking the soothe of certainty or knowing, as though there’s another angle that we hadn’t considered, always just out of reach, at which we can finally feel at rest.”
—Bradley Trumpfheller