My Mother of Invention
by Michael Collier

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The needle goes up and down on my mother’s Singer,
squat black with its gold scroll and script,
shaped like a smokestack turned on its side.

Have you ever seen a dipper bobbing in a stream?
It’s like the Singer but so much slower. Its beak
makes thread of water and sews patterns of spreading ripples.

Such a fierce engine at the center of creation
and beautifully sculpted, a porcelain boot
or a falconer’s gauntlet. The dipper likes the action

of a cataract, the rapid tumble of rapids,
and if it wants walks easily along the stream’s pebbly bottom.
Hour after hour, my mother’s fingers fed the fabric

through the pressing foot, kept the seams flat,
while thread spooled out and the bobbin coaxed up
from its metal gear held the stitch.

The American Dipper? What joy in finding such a bird.
Its short trills punctuated by sharp, clear zeets.
Its eyelid white against total gray, when it blinks.

If it didn’t exist, you’d have to make it up.
You’d have to give it its own day of creation,
a day of translucent patterns, pinking shears, and pins.

You’d have to say, come see how the sewing machine
in its sleek skin dips and bobs and swims,
and how my mother, white eyelid lined blue,

sings her same stitched tune—never remembered
so never heard—and how like a solitary
calls out, not in air but under water.

"My Mother of Invention" by Michael Collier, from AN INDIVIDUAL HISTORY by Michael Collier, copyright © 2012 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.