Artists

A girl with her great-
grandmother in her veins
would arrive on earth
knowing how to show things
and people to themselves,

the skill in hands that flows
down through her family
but won’t fetch food or rent
so she knows not to try,
though in art class before

she graduates to be a secretary
to sexist men, my mother saves
who she is from the waist up
in a chunk of plaster where I
can read her face eighty

years after, self-image for
the granddaughter of an artist
who had to become a nurse,
the daughter of an artist who
had to be a plumber

and in the dementia ward
when I hold her stilled hands
in my stupid ones that never
got the gift, I see the beautiful
stone girl at home on my shelf  

watching silent down the years
for her gene to sing up again
in the circulatory system
of someone who can use it
this time to be whole.