Mary Cassat, 1876

You might think she would want
for nothing. Mediterranean
blue under salt white, her daytime satin
at-home bodice says leisure, but the work
of her left hand says otherwise: her maroon thread thin
as Clotho’s, stark
as need, she pulls it taut
so that a visitor’s eye follows not
her posture (leaning
forward) but her cantilevered
fingers, meaning-
fully plain gold wedding band,
and comfy half-smile, meant
to hide her smooth-
as-milk-glass concentration. She might well wear
herself out (mostly indoors) so that no one
else will: to be always provisioning, fixing (as in
to fix a meal), mending, converting whatever
approaches her soft-focus eyes
(their brushstrokes spare,
incapable of anger, or even surprise)
into a creature she can soothe,
companionably, gradually, so it might stand
(the always-unfinished square
of embroidery beside her) someday on its own,
as this black pup
or pup-sized miniature retriever stands up,
ears down, forepaws out, sejant-rampant,
letting her know or believe
that she’s never amiss,
holding up every impatient, brittle, off-
true (with respect to the plane
of the picture frame) line:
whatever she has up her ruched sleeve
can wait, her impression
of satisfaction looks great,
and the dog, at least, thinks this
year we’ll be safe,
if not fine.

//

Author’s Commentary:

Honestly you’re reading a poem about my mom. Mary Cassatt’s possibly her favorite painter, and one of the first painters she told me about when I was a girl (not that anyone knew I was a girl back then). Her mom, Ruth Marx Cass, trained very seriously as a painter and graphic artist: you can see some of her work here and here, and she did charcoals and sketches for posters and for an all-ages illustrated book about Passover. My mom, herself, is finally having an art opening for her own painting, which she resumed a while after my youngest brother grew up and got married and stuff. Cassatt was the only woman in the center of the Impressionist group in Paris and the only American; she’s remembered primarily for paintings featuring kids, because of course she is, the women-femininity-motherhood axis is hard to stop once it gets spinning. This Cassatt painting, which you can see here, got me thinking about how parents, especially moms, get told (often with good reason) to give up everything else in order to make sure their kids stay safe, to re-orient our lives around our kids. Sometimes that’s just what the kids need. Sometimes it keeps the kids from learning to lead their own lives and find their own x and y axes. It’s hard to tell how far—in protecting your kids; in giving up things for your kids—is too far, especially when you’re in the thick of it, and the stakes seem unreasonably high. If you’re a dog, though, you don’t have to worry about how you can teach your kids independence, nor about whether your mom ever got to learn it. You just follow the people you regard as yours, and they feed you, and keep you on a string, and you figure they’re fine if they’re not afraid, and you’re not afraid, because their safety (depending on what kind of dog you might be) amounts to your highest reward.

Does that make the poem queer? It’s queer if a queer girl wrote it, but it’s also—I think—a poem about heteronormativity, and the nuclear family, and the way we do not normally expect a good dad to stay home. I tried to be a good dad for a few years back there, and I had a tough time. I very much prefer trying to be a good mom.