My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party

By David Bottoms b. 1949 David Bottoms

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 children sprouting daily

in that garden of trauma behind her eyes.

Then Rachel’s turn,

the smallest child in class, and up she went, legs twined

on the rope, ponytail swinging, fifteen, twenty,

twenty-five feet, the pink tendrils of her leotard

climbing without effort

until she’d cleared the lower rafters.

She looked down, then up, hanging in that balance

of pride and fear,

then glancing

toward the bleachers to see if I watched, let go

her left hand, unworried by that boy

with the waffled skull, stiff and turning blue

under the belly of a horse,

or the Christmas Eve skater on Cagle’s Lake,

her face a black plum

against the bottom of the ice.

David Bottoms, “My Daughter at the Gymnastics Party” from Vagrant Grace. Copyright © 1999 by David Bottoms. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Vagrant Grace: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

Biography

David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia in 1949. He earned an MA from the University of West Georgia and a PhD from Florida State University. In 1979, Bottoms won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. Robert Penn Warren, the contest’s judge, described Bottoms as “a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is . . .

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