On the surface, D. L. Emblen's poem sketches a quiet domestic scene: an elderly woman sitting on a lawn at noon, sharing her lunch with seagulls and telling them stories. The speaker calls her "my mother-in-law," a phrase that places him slightly outside the family circle, an observer who might easily dismiss her talk as eccentric or confused. The poem's achievement is that it never says so outright. Instead it lets her words accumulate until the reader begins to suspect that she knows something the sensible people around her have forgotten.
Look first at what Mother actually says. Her claims are fantastical: "ledges full of gold just off shore," "rafts of teakwood, loaded with jade," a place where two currents meet and no ship can pass. The line that carries the most weight is the last of the first stanza: "death and birth are hard to tell apart in the sea off-shore." This is the poem's quiet philosophical centre. A woman near the end of her life speaks of the sea as a place where endings and beginnings blur, and the reader may sense that she is describing her own situation as much as the ocean's. The poem never states this, which is exactly why it works; the idea is left for us to find, like treasure.
The middle stanza turns inland. Mother's second subject is New Mexico, rendered in startlingly specific images: "saline flats where ancient arrowheads litter the cracking earth like shells on a beach," and "moonlight through tall ash trees arched across the irrigation ditches." The simile is the key. Arrowheads become shells, desert becomes shore. Even when she speaks of the land, she carries the sea with her, and her memories of dry country are shaped by the same imagery as her sea fantasies. The poem suggests that for her, the two places have merged into one landscape of the mind, where old things lie scattered and waiting to be picked up. Notice, too, how long that line is, how it unspools across the page like the memory it describes.
The seagulls are the poem's gentlest invention. They "nod and walk about," the perfect behaviour of a patient audience, and they respond in kind, recalling "the albatross who couldn't fly, / or the whale who smiled / or some of the milder mysteries of the depths and shallows of mid-sea." The word "milder" is delightful. It implies that the mysteries Mother tells of are, by comparison, the strong stuff. Here the poem shifts into something close to a fable, and the humour is warm rather than mocking. Two lonely storytellers, one human and one bird, trade tales and ask no questions of each other.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed metre. Its lines vary from short to sprawling, and the rhythm follows the cadence of speech, of someone talking steadily without needing to be interrupted. This free movement suits the subject: Mother's talk wanders, circles back, and drifts from gold to arrowheads to pearls without apology. The repeated "Mother says" gives the opening and closing stanzas a loose frame, like a refrain, while the middle stanza lets her voice rest on the lawn.
The ending delivers the poem's real argument. "Greater treasures than small schools of silver smelt" are found by the pier, and "in the scruff of foam about each breaking wave / pearls are born." The movement downward in scale is the point: after gold ledges and jade rafts, the true wonder turns out to be small, common, and everywhere. Foam, which most people walk past, becomes the birthplace of pearls. Together with the earlier line about death and birth, the closing image carries the poem's gentle consolation. What looks like rambling may be a form of attention, and what looks like decline may be a way of seeing more, not less.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It asks us to listen to someone we might be tempted to humour, and rewards us for doing so.