The Man Who Didn’t Need Mothering
by Charlene Baldridge
June 12, 2008 — Published in Verse
From the time you spat the nipple out and walked,
you were never mine.
I wish now I hadn’t thrown that tacky
World’s Greatest Mother plate against the wall,
wish I could locate the Lucite cube you transformed
into an under-the-seascape
replete with diver and octopus.
The terra cotta I thought was yours
turned out to be your sister’s creation,
and I can’t find that either —
likely smithereens, along with our hearts.
On the anniversary of your death,
we search out all the photographs,
from your bald, little-old-man shots at two months
to the ones on Sharon’s patio after you fell from the sky —
you, in a navy-blue pea cap, fingering the orange canvas
that covered your polyester wings.
I can no longer summon anger over much of anything,
not your dismissal of me from your adult life,
not even my foolish destruction of what relics remained.
That you existed and tugged at my breast is certain.
You tug still, especially when I consider what you evoked.
That you died over several years without bothering to
let me know, is unfathomable, but typical:
You always did everything on your own to prove
that you were a man who didn’t need mothering.
And now that I am a woman who does,
and have no mother, I turn to your sister,
she who turns the pages of photograph albums
and has no child but me.
Charlene Baldridge
As set by Jake Heggie, Charlene’s poems are heard on concert platforms, sung by Frederica von Stade. Widely published, Charlene, 74, performs her work with musicians, most recently at San Diego Museum of Art, Museum of the Living Artist and Kensington Concerts.
Subscribe to Mind Sprocket magazine today. It's free and it's fabulous.
RSS feed