The Value of Despair

Henry Miller instructs me
not to spare my children
their agony; to bathe them
in the painful acid of truth.
But he also wrote of cunts
prolifically, turning them
inside out and incandescent,
and as a child I read his words
with such commitment
to understanding the haunted
caverns of the female sex,
maybe this is why I am alone 
now with these two children,
still trying to decipher
the language of my body.

My son, like Miller, has a beloved
bicycle which he pedals back
and forth past our driveway, waving
at every pass. His passion
for bitter fruit, firm, green olives,
lemon in its waxy rind,
seed of the coffee cherry—
his attention to a God
he does not understand, his blessings
upon our dinner table, his wrath
at my forgetfulness;
that I might forget his question
from a minute earlier is proof
that I might forget
he is mine.

I am honest with my love.
It is clear like glass; hold it up
and my laughter curls
into petals of fog
on the surface. I love
to laugh with both my children,
their cheeks glued to mine,
but it is getting harder
to hold them there;
one reaches out a timid hand
as if to a roaring fire; the other
runs to it.

My daughter who insists
on keeping a sea of wild tears
to herself, who is reading
her own version of Miller’s
incandescent cunts,
who dives into the current
I am constantly trying to save her
from. Her brother’s hunger
for blessings and belief,
her own to be fed to the lions,
clawed at until that great ocean
of wasted tears is unleashed—
these I try to feed with love,

And their love feeds me,
richer than anything I have
ever tasted; I am sick with it
as I sit and wave to these arrows
sprung from my body, soaring
past my driveway or sprinting,
arms flung wide.