Laura Read
Winged Victory
When I walked up the stairs in the Louvre
towards The Winged Victory,
I cried as I told my son the story
of when I brought my mom to see her
and she wept and told me
she never thought she’d get here,
and he said, Say something cool
I can tell my children some day,
and I said, I miss my mother at 46.
You are supposed to view The Winged Victory
from the side to understand the full force
of her body leaning into the wind
on her imaginary ship,
but I always see her in memory from the front,
my mother and I climbing towards her
and her body leaning towards us.
Time is my medium and my subject.
Tell your children I said so much time
has passed and then I cried, tell them
I talked with your father on the phone
and said things you found obvious
like you are sleeping while I am trying to find
the exact spot where I stood in 1990
between Le Dome with its shelf of fish on ice
and la fleuriste with its buckets of flowers
and told myself in nine hours
my mother will look up at the same moon
I am seeing now.
My son says, Mom, how can you not understand
time zones? and I think of a movie I saw once
in which the man spends the couple’s whole
nest egg and the woman tell him that in no
circumstance can he ever say nest or egg again,
and I say to Ben, c’est toi who does not
understand time or zone or moon or corner
of boulevard and 1990.
Moi, je comprends.
Moi, j’adore how the French
always start their sentences with moi.
Moi, I speak for myself, of what I do
and do not understand.
My mother’s life is nearing its end.
My friend Aileen asked me if it’s difficult
never to be alone in the present,
always to be carrying the past.
I said, well, it’s Anne Carson’s question, isn’t it,
Where can I put it down?
One must carry it. On doit. Il faut que.
I remember the subjunctive.
I like to boss myself around. I carry it.
It’s just a slip of shadow I look through
like when you put a scarf over a lamp.
Laura Read is the author But She Is Also Jane, Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral, and The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.