I broke
my mother’s heart when I broke
it off with the first
man I planned to marry, just
what she’d have wanted in a husband: steady-as-a-pump, dependable,
professional. He designed industrial—and it sounds a little
more romantic and less ironic to me now
than it did then—pumps. Knew
all about flow and circulation,
could describe precisely through equation
the things I’ve spent
the intervening years attempting to apprehend
through language and line,
hurling one
word against another,
to hear
them slap, crack, crash, strike jagged rock
crouched just below a dark,
and you knew this already, deceptive
surface, varying with each toss the frequency, period, depth:
lines like water rushing forward in multi-syllabic waves, then slowing
to crawl, a crab moving
against the inevitable:
the tide of maternal desire, the pull
of the number tow within my own divided
mind.
The lack of ease
with which I swim. And always
the contest between lungs given to giving
out at the precise moment when surfacing
for breath brings a blow to the head,
the incalculable weight of something that should not really be solid
breaking against you, the rush of liquid into the gap of insubstantiality, an empty
set you can’t sustain. This was supposed to be about my mother: about how
you can’t control your child’s heart
no matter how you want
to, or what you think’s best,
and how I came to find that out,
and how my ex- had a few rocks lurking
beneath that placid surface, but like every breathing thing,
it has its own
life, and seems, if I had to say, to be about the imagination
or epistemology, instead,
and, as always, my own rocky romance with God.
--published in Obstructed View (Fireweed Press, 2009)