All Born Perfect

Tarot reading today. She said, "don't hold back, go for it." (Do they all say that?) Since I'm calling this blog All Born Perfect, here's the poem that goes with it, to be published in The Same this Spring:

All Born Perfect

Objects of my life
strewn across this table,
laid down in the precision of words:
green apples from a basket,
notebook and pen,
what I will say
and even what I won’t.

The old sorrow--
the one that won't go away
no matter how much healing
through talking, pills, sex, wine,
even vengeance--
has become a blind dog now
its snout resting on paws.
Rilke said the dragons of fear
really just want our love.

The old sorrow remains
despite the distractions and good news
and good weather.
Everything that’s happened.
Even my children don’t erase it.
Instead they gather
new ones for themselves
they imagine no one else carries,
all born perfect with howling needs.

Does anything change as we
learn to read, write,
submerge our needs?

I have gone away to motherhood
and in that place where mothers stood
there is silence.

“You will write again,” said Stanley Kunitz
in my dream.
“You will speak
in a green voice
you hardly recognize.
Trust that voice.
A child’s song is in that voice.”
--Carla Drysdale