When the Parents Went


When my parents,
Who separated
When I was four,

Died roughly
Within a year of each other
Last year

—She on one coast of America,
He on the other (Boxers
To their corners!)—

I felt lightened
And folded
Towards myself, quietly,

Where someone laughed loudly,
As I’d heard sometimes happens
To sons and daughters

At funerals.
I think my half-brother, step-
Brother, and step-sister expected me

To cry at the memorial ceremony
For my mother, but I didn’t.
I felt solicitous

Of other people’s mourning, but otherwise
I felt wonderfully, maturely
Brutal—in full throttle, really.

That side of my family
Spent a night together
Before I left, a night

With the photograph album,
And when we came to
The picture of Mom’s first marriage

To my father, whom no one else
In the room really knew, everyone
In the room was duly amazed

By how miserable Mom looked
In the photo. It had been a shotgun
Wedding, occasioned by me,

There already
In Mom’s belly, six months
Before, unwanted, I came to be.

Now she was gone
They were both gone, and there
Seemed no way in hell

They could ever again reach me
In the same way, which seemed
So good to me. It was over.

The long arc of unwant was over,
And all we all did trying to come to terms
With unwant—an impossibility—

Was ended
With their going,
Which was more

Than I ever dared
Hope for. That time
Of the three of us worrying

That bone—that DNA, that inherit,
That mistake made back
In the 1940s—that time

Was blessedly over, and only I
Was left over to make
Whatever could be made of that folly.

From Gettysburg Review.