Spellbind

          for Dante on his tenth birthday, with apologies

When the surgeon handed me
the squalling package of your life

I acquired
a mother's imagination.
If you were out of my sight for a minute

I would forever see you tucked up
in catastrophe's specimen drawer,
awaiting classification.

I was not unlike the serial murderer
who sees in one bright face at the shopping mall

ghastly potential.
Joy seamed
equally with random brutality,

which of course it is.
In my brain the cold light
love triggers

flooded on. Unseemly
fear-rehearsing grief. Amulet worry. Fear to forestall fate?
There was no incubation period.

A baby is such pretty meat! And all around me the starving world pressed in.
The nurses, whom I could not trust,
busied themselves with their secret plotting, needles, and feigned interest in my bowels.

You were so necessary already
that if I should lose you,
I would die howling naked, having

first torn out my hair
and stuffed it into my mouth like weeds.
A mother is a goth queen,

dark by breeding.
How could I resist
the veil? The heart's mad hammer-stroke falling?

Ten years like this, and the cost of everything
is still everything.
I know I scared your father

that first day.
In our dim hospital cell
lit by my eyes surveying him, he had to wait
until Demerol delivered

its knock-out kick to lift you
free from my arms.
Then he carried you to the tower room's one windowlight and sang some gentle magic

into your glowing face,

a father's spell
to always protect you from me.

Dante, I swear,
I only pretended to be sleeping!

Dorothy Barresi
The Southern Review
Spring 2005

Copyright © 2005 by Louisiana State University.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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