My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party by David Bottoms

My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party

by David Bottoms

(from his 1999 book, Vagrant Grace, published by Copper Canyon Press)

When I sat for a moment in the bleachers

of the lower-school gym

to watch, one by one, the girls of my daughter’s kindergarten

climb the fat rope hung over the Styrofoam pit,

I remembered my sweet exasperated mother

and those shifting faces of injury

that followed me like an odor to ball games and practices,

playgrounds of monkey bars

and trampolines, those wilted childr...