If She Were Here

Some prevailing wind –
a weather system you were in –
continual expenditure
of energy in one direction –
as if sped ahead along
the blank containing banks
of some eruptive river which,
invisible yet irresistible,

refused not to enlist you
in its insurrection: not unlikely
as the narrative, the story
you would fashion
of your past. It plausibly
suggests why nothing lasts:
too fleet and indiscriminate:
though maybe faulty in its

implication of a unity:
as if one thing advanced
more than another. You think
about your mother, born
on Christmas Eve. Pushing
off the isthmus of her death,
you’d had to leave so many
harbors: out to find

new marvels of a rich autonomy –
which surely ached, still aches
to grow. But strange,
the way things go,
always pushing off the banks
into another river. If she
were here, you wonder
what you’d have to give her.

.