Ruth Hoberman

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

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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