mean anything for the likelihood
of others’. It’s all a trick
on the parent-heart, and we all fall for it,
how else to sleep? When I was advising
a dear student about her chances
of becoming a Rhodes scholar,
there were many grueling numbers
and pairs of numbers meant to terrify:
forty thousand applicants for twenty-four scholarships,
for example. But once she was a finalist,
I told her: your odds are now 50:50.
Not 852:1. Either you get it or you don’t.
Yes, parents. I wish that my son’s pain
meant your child would be spared,
but my son is not Christ. And I am no
damn Pietà Mary. In spite of our proximity,
your kid is just as likely to be next. 50:50.
By the way, the student didn’t end up
a Rhodes scholar, and I told her
that, for a poet, the experience
of not winning the prize was going to be
more useful than anything else
thus far. Oh, but paltry usefulness!
The uses of disappointment are shit
when you just want the big damn prize
or want your child to be able to move
his limbs and talk. Back to the friends,
though, since this is the only place
I can go back to them, it seemed
to me that those most frightened
not only for their children but about
their places in the world, they were the most
grindingly inept, the least able to drum up
compassion. Those gunning for tenure
with little achievement to support it,
stay-at-home moms who had once
been talented but were now pretending
they were not in order to “raise a family”
and to slide into inanity. I don’t know what to
make of such spiritual inertia but it seems
like the same stuff racism’s made of:
fear of difference: As long as it’s not me,
I don’t have to know anything about it.
As long as they stay the hell away from me,
it never has to be me. As long as they stay
weak enough they can believe they will never
be gutted by this particular pain. Not my
child, hurt like that. As long as they seem
incapable of handling such trauma,
God will never force them to.
Secret, smug believers! God never gives you
more than you can bear, they like to say, as if
the strong should be punished for their strength:
We can bear it. So we got it.
But what about my baby? How weak does
a newborn have to be to escape God’s burdens?
And why press down so hard on Cal when
it was I who grossly claimed superhuman strength:
I know I can deliver him, I know I can
push. I don’t care how much pain I’m in,
I can handle it! I can do it! I’m the strongest
fucking woman in the world!
When in fact, if I had let myself be weak,
a C-section would have kept Cal safe
and I’d never have seen the true spirit
of some of my once-close friends.
It’s like that old college saying:
Alcohol kills brain cells, but only the weak ones.
I’m certain that I’m merely, unadmirably,
jealous of these friends who certainly
have their own problems,
just not the problem of an injured child,
and I have an uncomfortable,
oozing rage, as if I’d pissed myself
and had to sit in it. Rage that those
who are so fearful of my pain are the ones
who will be most spared it in their own lives.
Let them be poor, then, let them continue
their sexless marriages! Give them
a number of “scares” after which
everything will be fine. A surgery or two.
Misery. Even give them the illnesses
and deaths of their own worthless
parents. These are the mute friends
whose children will be spared.
May they suffer every other misfortune!
I probably shouldn’t be telling you
such ugly, monstrous things, Cal,
and I’m not. I’m telling the Andromedans,
to plea for a place in their galaxy.
I want to tell them I am among weak
people here, and I am strong,
and I don’t want to be strong anymore.
Let me be weak in your world,
among kind people who are not afraid.
We’ll just have to convince them
that we belong there, Cal, though I’m worried.
I’ve become bitter and angry,
not at all the kind of citizen I imagine
they’d honor with a new beginning.
But then, “beginning” begins with “beg.”
•
Okay, the truth?
I’ve been wrong or I’ve been lying
or I’ve been ignorant. It doesn’t matter
which. But now it’s time to give it up.
You came from Andromeda, Cal,
that other galaxy. Came to me, to us,
the moment you were born,
when the membrane between
worlds snapped and all that alien love
flooded my body. It came from you.
There was awful confusion because
you didn’t seem to be of this world
and the ordinary humans
didn’t know what to do. Not even me.
Mommy and her stories, those fairy
tales we have here,
wretched and unending, children
lost in the woods. No wonder you’ve
always looked at me so quizzically,
a story like that is too tiny to contain
Andromedan you, lost in the Milky Way,
magical boy weak from his first
intergalactic journey to my arms.
I found you, didn’t I? I am here.
We found each other, we are here.
And here is where we belong, for here
is where you are you. Exactly you.
Not some other boy in some other world.
I was wrong to mourn so, he deserves
better and so forth. You are better.
Better than any lesser truth I could invent.
I opened my eyes from that long dream
to find you here, my perfect child.
You taught me the truth, Cal.
Accept the truth from whoever gives it,
the ancients said to your people.
The truth is you are the truth,
a child born to a liar who is learning
to change. A dashing boy who may never
walk who traveled so far
to be here. A joyful boy who may never
talk who ruthlessly teaches
the teacher the truth
about where children really live.
Where you are alive. You are the most
perfect Calvin Makoto Teicher
of the Universe, a tough, funny
beauty of a boy who holds my hand
and blinks his eyes until I’m
excruciated, mad with love.
How hard it was for you to convince
me that I deserved that love.
My glorious son! A mother’s boast
is never merely delusion. A mother
knows, if she can forgive herself
for not knowing. I know now, Cal.
Your frail arms are perfect arms.
Your uncertain eyes, perfect
eyes.
Your anguish, your illness, your pain.
Your difficulty, your discovery. Your joy
is my joy and it is a perfect, boundless joy.
God must exist, a God for me after all,
and he must be good, everlastingly so,
to have given you to me.
I don’t need any more proof than this.
You in my arms, your little searching fingers
on my face. Wistful, graceful
stars on a wet, clear night.
Galaxies exploding everywhere
around us, exploding in us,
Cal, faster than the lightest light,
so much faster than love,
and our Andromeda, that dream,
I can feel it living in us like we
are its home. Like it remembers us
from its own childhood.
Oh, maybe, Cal, we are home,
if God will let us live here,
with Andromeda inside us,
doesn’t it seem we belong?
Now and then, will you help me belong
here, in this place where you became
my child, and I your mother
out of some instant of mystery
of crash and matter
scattered through the cosmos,
God-scooped and poured toward
our bodies. With so much love,
somehow. I am so tired
I cannot beat my own heart anymore.
Cal, shall we stay? Oh let’s stay.
We’ve only just arrived here,
rightly, whirling and weeping,
freely, breathing, brightly born.
About the Author
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Interior with Sudden Joy (FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Rumpus. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the editors of the following magazines: The Awl, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, Slate, and WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly).
Enormous thanks to the MacDowell Colony, for exquisite hospitality, beauty, magic. And gratitude to the Corporation of Yaddo, for generosity, time, space. This book wouldn’t exist without residencies in both places, and was in large part written in MacDowell’s New Jersey and Barnard studios and in Yaddo’s West House. Much work was accomplished thanks to the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown University. Thank you, American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets.
And with personal gratitude:
To Deborah Landau, Paul Muldoon, Hilton Als, Meghan O’rourke and the Pretendettes, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, J.D. McClatchy, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Elliott Dark, Rebecca Horne.
To Ann Hood, whose work and compassionate conversation gave me the courage to write the title poem. (Though she didn’t realize it and therefore shouldn’t be held responsible for its failures.)
This book is especially indebted to the beloved Members of Team Cal: Sami Akbari, Imelda Laborce, the Roosevelt School, Dr. Joseph Levy, Dr. Elizabeth Fiorino, Huck Ho, Tami Gaines, Robyn Uslip, Lindsay Orcutt, Lauren Joyce, and my family. And to the special moms who have really been there: Molly Peryer, Leonie Lewis, Eliza Factor, Aine Carroll, and Jamie Mirabella.
To Dr. Andrew S. Gardner, for Simone.
To Craig. I just love being with you. Even here, on the acknowledgments page, I am glad to be talking to you. You make me happy, and you make our kids happy. That’s all the kinds of happiness I need in this life, my love.
Copyright 2012 by Brenda Shaughnessy
All rights reserved
Cover art: Rebecca Horne, Untitled, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-55659-410-6
eISBN: 978-1-6193-202-84
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