Author of “One Woman” (Volume XXVI, 2022)

“Could you tell us who inspired the character in this poem?”

My son was shooting wedding photos for a friend of his wife’s family in Cathedral Park under the St. John’s Bridge in Portland, and I had come along as an equipment carrier and back-up photographer. At least two other photographers were at the park shooting portraits (one of another wedding couple and one of a high school senior). Not a native Portlander, I had never been to Cathedral Park and was struck by the beauty of the scene and the brides. I began to imagine how the mother of a daughter or daughters might view the scene, so the “one woman” of the poem is mostly imaginary.

Being a poet of a certain age, I often think of my own receding and my own children having outgrown me and surpassed me in accomplishments. So I thought about how a woman might think of herself on that bridge suspended between (first) her life as young bride and new mother and (later but not that much later) the mother of brides.

“Why did you choose to keep your poem in one long stanza instead of breaking it up?”

I kept the poem as a single stanza because life–especially for this “one woman”–is a single short bridge from past to future. I think this might be a projection of my own experience of parenthood. It all went by so fast. Presto change-o from baby to toddler to teen to married and gone.