On Mothering, Mortality, and the Wankel T. rex
Easter morning, my sleeping teenager hushes the house,
the only child still here, and not a child. Too old
for the scrawl of wax crayon on shell, the patient perching
of bent copper handle into purple vinegar. Too grown
for searching out candy in the same secret places.
At first, there’s a kind of sorrow in his slumber, for me.
He’s moved beyond belief in the unbelievable. Already
we don’t go to church, the day mostly just a holiday
all these years. A cake in the shape of a lamb, stuffed
rabbit named Cartoon nestled next to jellybeans.
The resurrection, the empty tomb, that is Easter.
But how to suspend disbelief, hold wonder beside
the cruel and brief world? Yet, next to the loss
of childhood, so much is gained: height, reason,
the late night deep conversations, the mornings
now more to myself as hours stretch, long and lanky
as my son. I’m not waking to an alarm to hide
chocolate eggs among tree roots. Instead, I pour coffee
and head back to bed, listen to a radio story
on rancher Kathy Wankel finding a T. rex in Montana.
He had been eighteen when he died, excavated
66 million years later in a kind of a rebirth. Wankel
became a mother by discovery. She called him her
big, ugly baby. He’s beautiful, she said. And, as mothers
must, Kathy let go of what was never hers.
Birth is long, but everything that happens next is longer.
Is Easter also fossils found, old bones born again
and delivered in protective cradles to the Smithsonian?
Is it daffodils and hyacinth, plastic baskets, pastel dresses?
An empty nest, fledglings flown to live new life?
Today, and just to me, it is my fourteen-year-old son
snoring behind his closed door, drawn shades shrouding
spring. I let go, decide he’s beautiful lying there
in the dark, unrisen, unmoved by the day’s surprises,
unafraid still of how we’re only mortal.
* * * * *
Telling the Bees
The Queen has died. The Royal Beekeeper
has visited the bees and put them
into mourning. I want to knock on a hive,
tell the bees my mother’s heart
needed repair. She is my monarch.
I got lost in Mount Auburn Cemetery
trying to pass the hours of her surgery,
followed Elder Path as if it led to my ancestors.
On another avenue, under a thick-limbed willow,
I tried to understand the carved letters —
what they said, how people could have
taken knives to bark and dug in,
adding their names as if the trunk were theirs.
I will apologize to the trees.
I, too, am a keeper. Have counted on nectar.
Have expected continuous honey.
I will tell the bees I am sorry
we don’t protect them, as they protect
their queen. I will apologize to my mother
for not loving our Mother as well as I should.
I will do as I am told. I will lean into the end-
of-summer goldenrod, and listen.