She feels as though she were losing him already
Yet she always dreaded this would happen.
He was now still younger than most of her poems
Yet older than she when she‘d written them.
She had made certain he was perfect
And he rarely disappointed
A shining solitaire
Testament to their once-shared argosy.
How surprised she was at how he‘d done it
The way that he would leave her
Always expecting a horrible accident
Or an illness
Felling his body
Cleaving his heart from soul.
She had imagined her own hospitalization
To keep her from hurting herself
At that thrall of outliving one‘s child
As she rended her clothes
And howled at fresh kill of the moon.
This was so simple, so elegant and so silent.
He need say nothing
It was just a choice
And she saw that a path had come to an end
Family tree with blunted trunk
Damaged branch
Ebbing life upon the bud
Never to be with blossom
Dismembered and maudled embryo.
She was startled at how much that hurt
As though the very roots felt pain
As though she were feeling all the old
Miscarriages of her life that tried to justify
A death wish on a child.
Like Demeter
She would wander
In the kingdom of the barren
While he kindly smiled
Pure as a Prince
Serene as new-born Venice
Sailing to his Ithaca
Still shaking his head, no.
It stops right here.
Always remember
You said I had to go against you —
A betrayal of the highest order —
And that when I did
I would know I had become a man.
You have gotten everything you ever wanted
And now that manhood too —
Most greedy of mothering threshers —
Which is why it stops right here.
I shall not craft
Your Venice for you
Or even your voyage to Ithaca
This you shall not have
Mother.
Now I am my own self
But you are a wicked old soul.