LIFER MOM

As I watch you grow older -

not like a kicking colt emerging into a stallion -

you grow courser;

your fear resolves

further and further into anger,

flushes of sorrow and remorse more and more rare.

Your features mature -

harder, yet harder -

your young body still filling out,

defensively rock hard.

My influence and counsel

ebb into meaninglessness

faster than if I’d sunk into an elderly dementia

your children unrecognized about my feet.

Neither speaks the words,

but we need to know

your safety and survival

means we both must let go -

let go ...

though I languish from the fraying tendril

of our letters and infrequent touch.

This man, this growing stranger -

you answer to my son’s name.

Once again, your routine has become my schedule,

calendars piled in a far closet.

The long drive repeated and repeated,

every sign, curve, building and gas station memorized,

minor changes noted, even celebrated.

Each season’s pattern known:

Here the rise where winter wheat breaks through dark earth,

soft and green.

Here, rushing water through ditches,

center pivots and irrigation tubes.

That bend where the low morning sun

sparkles off early frost on pale, dessicated corn stalks.

And here, where geese fill fields of crusted snow.

Then

acrid smoke from blackened ditches,

waves of heat from heaving asphalt,

overloaded trucks with broken springs and scraping brakes

lurching from spotlit fields,

black ice.

And again.

My own pain is so consuming

that I have never been able to feel shame.

I want to hate what you have become

are becoming

will continue to become,

but I will not.

I would rather suffer so

than lose what I have left of you.

I expected to watch you grow and join

the community of adults,

to celebrate your marriage and

the birth of your children,

your successes

and your glories.

And yet be your comfort

as you would help me as my strength diminished.

Your brother and your sister

recede

as my need for you grows.

We are forever numbed,

linked strangers in a vacuum

drifting through days,

joy forever denied.

Every day I see more clearly

that I shall not survive

this extended, secondary gestation,

as I’ve come to learn

that I should fear its brutal product.

Neither alone nor together

will we feel

the heat of the sun

and free air

on our faces.

My love will not fade, nor my tears become undone.

(More on this poem)