Erasers

The children are erasing
things again,
never doing it right—
I enter the room
to the sight
of their fists pressing
down on pencils,
heads bent over the page,
pushing too hard—
more smudge than blank.
We’re drawing you, they say
when I ask. If you put a pencil
on a table where
children draw
and write, what happens
to their mother? I
mistook
myself for her, letting
them erase me limb by limb
even as they sketched me
out again with each
and every cry,
Mama, mama, mine.
Last night I was reading
De Kooning’s biography—
the part where the author describes
how the artist felt
when Rauschenberg
asks him for a drawing
in order to erase it. To
let something go
because you love the fact of another’s
making more than you love
what you’d already made.
De Kooning said yes.
“It is no use worrying,” he wrote,
“about being related to something
it is impossible
not to be related to.”