Symphony
I am a mother
Though you are dead
I pretend otherwise
You feel me in that place that you are
And I sense you
In the small hands of my neighbor’s boy
In my urge to protect and let
Not one moment of harm befall
As if it were you, the ache inside
Sat next to me eating brunch
The waitress charmed by your precociousness
You don’t remind me a bit of myself
Just as my mother thought me a changeling
Who was the fair child she birthed? She wondered
Closing the door and walking into another universe
Away from the scold of maternity
It suited her to wear boob tubes and dance at 3am
Not wipe snot and vomit from the car seat.
OOO
And I see nothing of me in you
You eclipse a generation
Returning to be her and a little of your father
He had eyes that swallowed me whole
When I moved in his arms and invariably
He took and took and took
He also gave a little something of himself
Unwillingly in that hour before savagery
Even sadists have their moments of foreplay
It’s how they build to a crescendo
It’s how we fall for their slick words and
Hard falls
He filled me with you and underneath the green dress
I could see you swell and rise on the tide of my brine
Before the stairs before the marble
Cool on my burst cheek and the pattern of scarlet
He led me in oxblood to that single moment
We could have all ended there
With the moon ripe and redolent behind us
The smell of candle wax heavy on our hems.
OOO
There is no way to undo the circles
Looping through memory like planets fractured against starlight
There is only the clenched fist and a jump
Free wheeling in air, suspended
He watches with apocalypse eyes as I give birth
To the emptiness afterwards
Because his vision is winking out
Through time as we catapult and swing low
He tells me; you haven’t changed, your skin is still firm
And I splinter there in this path of thorns
The beating is joining bruises like daisy chains
You gave me life and then, bending close
Took it away with a snap of your callused fingers
We lie beneath the elm tree with our name carved
And you drink from my breast a milk of sorrow
I wanted you all to myself is your buttoned apology
It does not last .. it comes with the sharp pull on all fours
More hurt than can be described by sign and movement
Bearing a child and starting over bloodless
In one shattered moment
Leaning towards stairwell
Seeing you waiting
Below
Beckoning me
To fall
Afterbirth