In the Absence of My Son
By Christine Poreba
A white fluff drops onto my arm
and a wind from inside the wall of me
almost pushes me over—
because the errant milky puff reminds me
of “danaliah,” which my son loves for me to pick for him
on walks, so he can blow and blow the seed pods off.
But what has dropped on me
is not a dandelion and my son is not here and the wind
soon carries the mystery gossamer away and I am left
to go back to my room to study his drawing,
bold circles dashed in waxy streaks. In my solitude,
the world seems to be moving in slow motion,
nobody else to determine what comes next.
The quiet is too quiet but then I can’t get enough,
but my arms are bearing a wilderness.
Our goodbye was saved by his being two
and not yet bearing the weight of the knowledge of time,
making this hug and kiss goodbye for him no different
from any other. I, on the other hand,
went out on the porch and wept, leaning over the railing
to wait for one more glimpse of him
over the mountain with his grandparents,
on their way to pay homage to “the broken boat”
he’d been telling everyone about the whole vacation.
Every time we walked up close, there was no
avoiding the fact that the boat was really a charred stack of logs,
remains of a ski lodge burned down last winter.
But the illusion for him never seemed broken.
And why shouldn’t one thing become so easily another?
The old ski lift, then, a seat from a Ferris wheel.
Which I can almost see turning as I wake this morning
to a room of gorgeous light, to acres of silence, an ache but also a dream
of unsharpened pencils being sharpened.
Christine Poreba lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband John and their now three-year-old son Lewis. Her first book of poetry, Rough Knowledge, will be coming out from Anhinga Press this fall.
Return to the September 2015 Issue
