“Poem”
would be a
Beautiful name for a child
The kind of child
You must imagine with
Ringlet curls,
Head bent over a book
Or just the small legs dangling
From an open-armed tree
We forget that the word itself means
Create
Like fiction or the epic
Story of lost children
We created, engendered, if you will
Then destroyed
Through shear absence
Of imagination
You always used to say I was not
Your “real mom”
And I say,
“Tropes!”
What you really need to study are tropes.
For instance–
all the insinuating places
Fairy godmothers turn up:
(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)
The forever, the divine, the set-free, the
Real girl you
Should recognize in the faces now of your own
Bewildered children.
(Wake up, sleeping beauty…wake up)
If tragedy is a long-shot and comedy is a close-up
Then what is the Facebook shot of a young mother slumped
Out cold over the body of her own
Wailing child
On a van
On the way
To the methadone clinic?
I have swaddled my hands, wrapping the knuckles and the wrists, the wrists, palms, and knuckles again until they are bound. Then I have pushed these bound, mummified fists into gloves curved, padded, slightly weighted.
I don’t swing at people. I have, I can, but when I do I hold back, talk too much through my mouthguard, obsess about trauma.
Agent-causing-trauma. I-am-the-agent-causing-trauma.
On the bag I do not hold back. I aim for speed then alternate with power punches, slugging at the heavy, impassive face of a leather bag filled with sand or rags. Its resolute, anthropomorphized gut, its impassive reserve.
I do not worry unduly about traumatizing the bag. I can–am allowed to–wail on it in repeated, staccato acts of catharsis.
Because of trauma.
Because when you live long enough you have stories.
Stories linked to the pain of a very broken world.
The puzzle of trauma is the why and the injustice.
So I will call the why the jab and I will call the injustice the cross.
You see where I am going with this–the cross. The strong-right-arm move of a superhero God.
Whose go-to power punch so far was allowing the trauma to wash over him.
The trauma of the trial.
The trauma of the desertion.
The trauma of the betrayal.
The trauma of the kangaroo court.
The trauma of the beating.
The trauma of the spitting, the mocking, the shame.
The trauma of power in the hands of bad men.
The trauma of the broken-hearted God.
The trauma of the family.
The trauma of the thorns.
The trauma of the nakedness.
The trauma of the carried weight.
The trauma of the pierced extremities.
The trauma of the hours.
The trauma of each breath.
The trauma of blood loss.
The trauma of being forsaken.
The trauma of out-poured wrath.
The trauma of the grave.
The trauma of hell entire.
The prophet Zechariah gives us a picture of how we will respond to this trauma–
They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child
This litany of blows. This way that we must walk through the swaddling, the trauma, the raw lonely pain.
Because when He said it is finished, He meant it. In the oddest k-o win ever, the victor takes the blows, both jab and cross and appears to lose it all only to give each of us the power to
Fight trauma
Oh-Rescuer-God-
Jesus.
some stories hold
Such trauma
That in order to
Tell them
You have to use a Chinese box
What, you ask, is a Chinese box?
A Chinese box is a
Story
Within a story
Within a story
Not to be confused with
Chinese handcuffs
(Which is a very different thing indeed)
For example:
Once there were some children who lived in an apartment with their (biological) mother and father. They did not always eat. Sometimes they were left alone. The father beat the mother.
The loss was unbearable, said their foster mother. The boy was mute. The girl was cagey.
So small. So damaged. So angry.
They called her bad mommy, bad mommy, bad mommy.
Because there was only the one.
One room, one closet, one subterfuge, one million wrongs
In the circuits of his mind
He tells the story of the bad mommy, who was (he says) too much drama.
As she pieces together the past she neglects the symmetry of hearts, circles, and peanut butter sandwiches among the survivors
Because, as an ordinary prophet once said–every trauma has its own story…
Within these concentric
Chinese boxes.
some things remain dark
Obsidian dark
No matter how much you try to put distance between
The two of us
The video footage cannot, will not excise your presence
Obsidian dark
Is not your chicken-scratch handwriting
The horrible story I made you write down
Or the things you left out…
That so many people helped to…diminish
None more than you
The damage which will always be
dead dog on my chest
Ghosts of dogs should haunt us both
But let yours bark incessantly outside the grainy film of your transgressions
While mine
Returns whole, resurrected even,
To the cement driveway by the old house where the children played with the water hose and the blue plastic wading pool
Joy
They fill the screen with joy
For a moment even you could see
The way the thinnest layer of water poured out on rough cement
Reflects the sky
Reflects the light from the endless sky
Reflects the glory of this endless day we
…walk toward the sun, my one-time-child
Before the night
Falls forever
See you
In the face of the girl dancing across the circle
So much so that I stare
Think I might have to tell her
The story of the lost you
Who reminds me
Of all the other Boos
So beloved
To their Mama
Missing still
When I first saw Finding Nemo it was so much about you.
And after all these years, Finding Dory is much the same.
I may have been your brief and most arbitrary mama, but I will love you forever.
And your foster dad and I will never stop laying down the shells…not just for your way back to us, but as a mosaic for how you changed us forever.
You, beautiful girl.
you deserve
Truth clenched in both hands
For years I have puzzled
How would she know
“The real story?”
The only “mother” she ever knew kept her locked in a tower
Named her after stolen
Salad greens
Tell your twin
Running to Canada was the
line I could not, would not
Cross for love
Unlike a man we both know
Who crossed lines of law and love
Abandoned wife and children
Hid his treasure
Said he could not pay
No fairytale love-
Story for his first wife
Little ones
there are records of these things
The faces of the abandoned are familiar to you now
Unlike your own mother’s
Who they kept from you
Fear and sin will make an ordinary
Monster out of us all.
Sadie’s foster mother told me once-
They are Christians, you know!
Christians do not steal babies
Live lies
Or put their assets in their girlfriends’ names
But how would Rapunzel know that?
She would have to borrow her sisters’
Plaited hair
A ladder to
Set all three free
Then look for the small stones
Of Truth
Scattered along
the long road
Home.
the car crash in slow motion
The snake coiled to strike the child
The mother seeing bad news
In the doctor’s eyes
Some moments are so unforgettably awful
The spirit rises out
Of the body, off to one side
Hovers over the disaster
Snapping shots of all the carnage
A heart just beginning to break
Operates differently than
One far gone into the cave of grief
the last evening you were mine
Was the first time you met
Your new mommy, new daddy
Strangers then
You were delivered back to me
Sleeping I sat with you in my arms
Time folded around us
Everything paused
For our unlikely pieta
I had just enough sense
to stop everything
just to be with you
A little longer
Carrying Light 