Swallows and Waves

Seated one, loved by the lavishing comb

and fingers of another woman demon-

strating how attention and technique coalesce

into art. Where to go

when the mother is gone.

All occupations form to replace her.

What relief to be a girl again for an hour,

beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.

Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.