A Daughter’s a Daughter All of Her Life

Stirring, pines at Morgan Point ease me
into the day of my son’s wedding. First light,

swift as thought of God, of Shakespeare’s
searching eye of heaven, cannot scour

darkness from my heart that seizes into a claw.
I think of a tree limb that won’t bear new cones,

how it will snap, but how as the rupture ages, sap
will blacken, seal the break. By tonight, my son

will have a wife, my mother’s locket with
his round baby face will circle her neck. No way

to sandbag my heart, I must learn to bite my tongue,
control my starfish hands. Rooted in needles

they have shed, evergreens fingering my window
are not like me. They’ve spent their life knowing

when to bow, how to touch earth like an angler
kneeling in the rapids to let her shining trout go.

* Vivian Shipley is editor of Connecticut Review and the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner Society and numerous other prizes.