A Technical Question for My Daughter
  
  I don't know where you get it, this
  Growing you do; did you go out
  Of the house alone, down to the
  Pasture, to learn the way the pouts
  
  And dancing of the young fillies
  Set them on their legs?  It is clear
  You mean something by it, as when
  Earlier I thrust my hands near
  
  And then into your folds of flesh
  And, infant weak and pure, you thrust
  Them away, never even once
  Granting that you were what I must
  
  Clean and tend.  Where did you get this
  Lusting for all this competence,
  Skills you had a plan for from the
  Start?  I should have deduced the fence
  
  From the growing pile of rails but
  They made a plausible enough
  Pile of rails and I thought about
  The sure way they towered, a tough
  
  Problem in itself.  You added
  Speech, and began to know how sleep
  May be lost and wooed; then one day
  There you were, setting rails in deep
  
  Postholes you had dug by yourself.
  The laws of form draw us taller,
  Slowly, and set us in our own
  Universe - we say- not smaller
  
  By an inch than we grow to be.

Vicki Hearne, Nervous Horses, U Texas, Austin, 1980