My Mother's Toes

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

My mother's toes sat
quietly for years in great
comfort in their chair,
warm to the talk
of cotton, surrounded
now and again by dark
leather, or swathed
daily
in soft white denim.
Slowly they changed
like the course of a
river, shook off their banks
crossed and unchecked
became wild in their ways.
Heredity the doctors says
who cuts the tendons
who straightens the curve,
who put the pins in
like the Army Corps
of Engineers, who
heave and hoe.

Against the waterline,
at the edge of the tub
I see the flesh-colored
wall of my future
curving wild and away
imagine that new landscape.