An Imagined Atonement

An Imagined Atonement:

      on Mother’s Day

Who would want to happen just once?

It’s too abrupt that way, and

when you’re wrong it’s too late

to go back—you’ve done it forever.

                                                                Ways to Live

                                                                William Stafford

I wouldn’t want to be unforgiven,

for instance

if I missed the moment

you were waiting for and had been

hoping (though nobody would know

                                because part of the power you held everyone

                                accountable to was your silence

                                and later claiming

                                we should have known)

I’m long enough (though too often not)

looking into the dark

eyepiece of my old camera to try

and frame the thing I want to stop

forever and while I don’t know anything

about light or time, and  I don’t know

what’s going on inside the body or the distance

between my framing and my shutter speed,

my arrival on the paper is an acreage gone

fallow these days now that you’re gone

and I can’t prevent that from happening

even though I tried.

And now that it’s spring again and the birds

compete in the air  

with their singing and darting

I see I’m enough

of a failure to walk out

into it all an not know what I’m hearing

or, if I take myself to the lip

of the cup of coffee or the cliff

I wait but not long enough to taste

or see or feel the profundity

of what I’m swallowing or about to

or what I’m falling into or about to.

It’s relatable I suppose to the moments

I walked through the house after you’d

been taken away (and no arrests

were made, the men or women

who beat you and beat you are free

even today) and I  wasn’t

there or able to be

and I was remembering earlier

that week how you’d ben lucid

enough to seem

almost clairvoyant about what was

coming, saying maybe

if you could pull it off without laying

anything on your kids you’d let yourself

die right then.  It was just a month past

Mother’s Day and you said you refused

to take my call because I’d hurt you

but wouldn’t say how, just that I should

know and what kind of daughter

am I if I don’t know, but you said

it was enough staying alive remembering

your nephew who died on Mother’s Day

and your twin sister was suffering it

alone and you didn’t want to

do that to your own no matter what

they all did to you over the years.

And so by the time I can arrive

that week the five hundred miles is cut

though the rooms abandoned by you

and the blood’s been wiped up

by a kindly neighbor.  And now,

because you would die for real

five years later,

we’ll never know who you opened

the door to that night.  I’m all over

the place with this, you’re alive,

your not alive, but I tell you if it was

possible for me to go back

I’d be the one

to answer the door

I’d be the one to send them all off

I’d be home the day you say

you want to die and that’s the end

of it.  And  you’d’ve stayed

alive enough to

come for a drive on a quiet

May morning and you would want to

and you’d say it’s ok I know why

you moved all that time and all those miles

away and it’s hours and hours arriving

so many hours that you’d see to it

that  you waited for someone to come

and save your life

or at least

you’d want them to and you’d forgive them for being

a day or two late and take

any excuse for the delay

and say I’m  happy

I’m happy

to see you today when you open the door

on Mother’s Day, or on any day

it’s ok, come in I’ve missed you, it’s ok

and we don’t know whose saying it all because

we both are though really,

though the truth is it’s

the birds, it’s the open window,

it’s the light coming up among the paperwhites

and the pine trees you sleep beneath,

your stone dull with the fog

though it’s burning off, and it’s promising

to be a beautiful, beautiful day.