On the theme of Life Cycle
Because My Son Cannot Write This
You were someone who
understood him. He stood
Taller—
Wanted me always to send you
The work he’d done.
When you commissioned him,
paid him for his drawings
by buying him paints and brushes,
well, he was never prouder—
An eight-year-old pride
fragile and exposed.
(The bridge. The pause. This is the blank space in our lives where you chose door number 3—there is a simple woman there, it’s not complex. She leaves the television running;, her kid throws tantrums. Take her to Oprah’s couch , she’ll be fine. The air isn’t clear but it’s constant, she’s as familiar as your mother, in fact maybe it’s her—and you were your father for so long.)
Fragile and exposed. Yes—
(FYI: We are still hiding in the forest; there’s no road to our door; it hurts to breathe
up here; yes, it’s that fucking clear; we are parked in front of the fireplace in sleeping bags, because we get weather here; surviving is our constant. But back to the poem.)
He was cleaning up his room. No new toys
I warned, while the old are piled
in excavation heaps , a landfill on linoleum.
He brought the thrift store bag to me
It had everything you ever gave him:
A stuffed animal at his birth,
the last happy meal toy,
what was left of the dried up paints
from that moment you believed in him,
Showed him you understood him to be him.
And I had no words—
I’m not that kind of liar.
How can you tell a child who
loved somebody
He didn’t choose you?
Author Biography
Recent work by Margaret Garcia can be seen in Brain, Child Magazine, Outside In Magazine, The Weekenders Magazine, Huizache Journal, Catamaran Review, among others. She lives in the remote northeastern corner of the Sierra Nevadas, teaches college , and hosts an alternative women’s radio show and a book club show on Plumas Community Radio at www.kqny919.org. She blogs at Tales of a Sierra Madre.