Swallows and Waves

*Seated one, loved by the lavishing comb and fingers of another woman demon- strating how attention and technique coalesce into art. Where to go when the mother is gone. All occupations form to replace her. What relief to be a girl again for an hour, beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar.* **Paula Bohince** is the author of *The Children* and *Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods*. Her poems have appeared in the *New Yorker*, the *New York Review of Books*, *Poetry*, *Granta*, the *Nation*, and elsewhere.