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Pine Row Issue No. 10 Spring 2025 - Featured Poet
Rearview Mirror
Come see me
she said (not
like her to ask
so I went). We
ate salmon (out)
then sat on her bed
(as we had when
I was a child).
Gifted in silence,
we barely spoke,
just watched
some program
on PBS. So
perfect! (her friend
told me once):
how hard
it must be
to be
her daughter
(it was—
although
half her beauty
lay
in sadness.
She’d never lived
with a man she loved,
my father sent
scuttling long before
and no one really
since).
Next day she left me
at the train and
backed out slowly,
old neck straining
to swivel:
her car
removing itself
(somehow)
my last sight of her
(my tender
onlooker, my
I’ll-never-be-as
good-or-beautiful).
Seared, stretched
on a cedar plank
(the salmon was).
And did we have
dessert?
About the poem: as shared by the poet
About the poem: as shared by the poet
From the Desk of the Poet:
I was lucky enough to spend more than thirty years talking about literature with college students. Now in my mid-seventies, I still feel I’m in conversation with everyone I’ve ever read. I wrote "Rearview Mirror" after reading Dorianne Laux’s gorgeous poem “Mother’s Day.” I envied the speaker’s opportunity to care for her mother after a stroke, the shared time made more solemn by a sense of impending loss. I thought about my own last sight of my mother, a few weeks before her (sudden, unanticipated) death. Life is bewildering. Poetry for me is a way of thinking about what I don’t understand.
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems in such journals as (most recently) Salamander, RHINO, SWWIM Every Day, Ibbetson Street, and Connecticut River Review. You can read more about Ruth Hoberman here.
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