Body-Cast
  
By the time my son was thirteen he was complaining
they kept the jail too cold.  
I brought him a sweater and big thick socks,
which were confiscated,
so he couldn't hang himself, or another.
Yes, he's adopted;  that weary phrase to which I cling
with a dessicated soul to expunge myself from guilt.

I couldn't seem to love him enough through the demons
through the baggage saddling him
from seven months' gestation: the failed overdose; 
to the boyfriend's violating a tiny child's innocence
to get off for just a few second, just a few times,
to the thwack against a wall during
a particularly annoying squall,
which tempered his tantruming ways
and immobilized him for a time
via the blessing of a bodycast.         

We're separate now, as we always were,
I suppose -- him, knuckling his disgruntled ways 
through alarm-equipped halls
of a group home downtown,
and our visiting, rarely.
“I love you Mommy,” he says on the phone
and I return the thought,
which is shot into the cosmos
hoping someday it might register
and impact his behavior.
But I'm now befuddled by the
concept of cause and effect,
just as he was, and is:
it slips through our un-touching fingers
like so much sloo. On the one hand,
he says “I love you,” and on the other hand
was.........     And so.

Today I sit solo.  He's off to the mall
with the other teens,
those quasi half-brothers
with their ownhorrid histories
happily applying allowances
toward stupid, noisy past-times --
anything to preclude rumination.
I practice piano, trying to coax from it
what a mother might want from
or wish for, a child -- for him to sing and soar,
to somehow amend this world
but foremost, the inner one, that mooning
mourning dove wrapped in wings of woe. 
.
It is just now, on this gray day, sleeting slantwise
The soft fall makes no sound;
the little blobs plop, and I think::
Tears, opaque tears, from wherever --
that place from which we both sprang
united for a short duration, and now,
mute in our mingled yet disparate agonies,
our separate cells.

I hear, in the piano's complex permutations,
synaesthesias that thrill me with the color of sound,
their profusion and swell, and find
a measure of contentment
in the tranquil confinement of keys
their unequivocal symmetry, austerity,
their simple black and white.
   
                
 -- Copyright Julianza Shavin 2007