wildscape. literary journal

Pietà
by Elizabeth C. Garcia

At bedtime my son hesitates, asks, 
            will you lie down with me?
 
                                      He’s swaddled in his blue robe,
                                    	                nestled in his pets, not yet ready
 
to say goodbye. Tomorrow, I leave 
            on a short trip. He reaches out to me,
 
                                      and I lie down, hold my only boy.
                                                	I hate it when you go
 
he says, and I watch his lip tremble,
            his face give way like marble beneath
 
                                     the hammer, like rock
                                                       tumbling down a shaft.
 
What do I call this need to be away, this
                  sometimes-I-must-unmother-myself,
 
                                     peel away this self like birch bark, 
                                                        like a sweaty sock?
 
If grief is another name for love,
            I’m close to believing what he says
 
                                    every night like a mantra: I love you 
                                    	              more than you love me. 
 
(Oh, I do not deserve this!)— maybe 
                a mother’s love does 
 
                                     have edges. Last night, I keeled at the edge
                                    	                of thought: my mother, 
 
gone.                What will it mean
            to be motherless? No—
 
                                     what will it feel? Like this: 
                                                      little prophet, grieving what is not yet.
            
He lies down before it like a martyr,
             welcoming its fist, its stony kiss.
            
                                     Three days without my body is an abyss.
                                                      He holds me, comfortless 
 
in his loss of me, strokes his memory 
                  of every other time I’ve died,
            
                                     that a return lessens not the untethering,
                                                       the floating loose into cold space, the vault
            
of abandonment, that I, once gone,
            am always gone. That though I kiss him,
 
 
                                    I am never coming back.

about the author // Elizabeth C. Garcia