On Keeping Things Small

"Outweighing what we cannot change, and growing, " Marilyn Bushman-Carlton considers how the landscape of one's life evolves. Her children are growing up. One plays violin, and the music he chooses "turns him inside out, / becomes a voice to find himself." She watches him leave for school in the morning, "the crotch of his X-tra Large pants swinging / between the clothespins of his knees, / the waist nearly a foot south / and cinched like a knapsack."

When did the neighborhood lose its innocence? she wonders. She notices the twisted trunks of century-old shrubs. In her day she "tried not to stare / in the open door of the beer joint / on my way to Linda's house, " imagining what it was like heavy thick mugs, / sloshing the counter / with bubbly brown sin." Instead, she and Linda sat "beneath a sycamore ... almond arms bared, jeans rolled thin / above the knees. Whispered news / Suzanne's parents getting a divorce"; hope "it isn't so."

"We've circled back, " she tells her husband. Their daughter has left for college. "We've learned that pausing helps us see. / We bend toward, and cherish, / the few things we're sure of."