Trace

The pencil’s pressure, lead both hard and soft,

so there and not, I questioned

the very physics of the thing,

as if I were lifting,

like files to a magnet,

the image from beneath the onion skin,

what my mother called tracing paper,

material light as a veil and stiff

as her bridal gown.

How could both continue to exist?

Once, I showed her something so

unlike my traces, I believed

she’d deem it genius: watercolor

on cling wrap, like a new

stained glass. I said

I planned to enter it

into the school art competition. I was eight.

She encouraged me, instead, to submit

art we’d made together,

her hand more evident than mine.

Not long before

she died, I mailed her a portable

watercolor set. I found it unopened

at her two-room apartment after.

I took it and the few things

that fit in my suitcase.

We were ashamed of each other

in ways only intimates can be.

They say you cannot love another

until you love yourself,

but I’m not sure that’s true.

First, I loved my mother,

just as the one that drew and the one

that copied, by virtue of their separate

gazes loved, for as long as their attention

lasted, the original object

apart from them, whole only

for the duration of that gaze.