She makes one bust after another: seventeen,
forty-four, sixty-seven small faces of Colonel Robert Shaw.
She finishes one, collects money for another
to adorn mantelpieces in elegant parlors.
She likes molding clay, and setting those shapes in plaster,
but marble is smoother, with a sheen like pearls.
She calculates that the price of about a hundred will buy
her a ticket across the Atlantic, a train across Europe to Rome.
When she gets a commission for a bust of Abraham Lincoln
to be done in marble, she knows pine floors must be swept,
chickens fed, and dried apple pies baked without her.
She packs the few things she owns, writes to tell Ruth
she is leaving. In the kitchen, Mrs. Child is making jelly
from plums a neighbor thought too small to save.
Study the classics, she says, but don’t forget
your Christian education. She spreads newspaper
under clear jars, stirs the bubbling, warm fruit,
licks a deep red stain from her wrist.
Perhaps you can wait until the currants come in.
There’s little ill a good currant jelly can’t cure.
The harbor will still be open, not yet iced over,
but Edmonia won’t wait for that or a reply from Ruth.
She must go while she has the money and an invitation.
Mrs. Child gives her a knitted pair of slippers.
Did I tell you how much sickness can be avoided
by putting on slippers every morning?
Edmonia folds them so they fit in her hands
like the small sculptures of deerskin
her mother made when she was a baby,
smooth as a swan’s wings collapsing back
into her own feathered body.