A Mother's Day Poem, in Lieu of Flowers

Dedicated

Born babbling, your preverbal baby
was showered with such love he couldn't shut up
about it. In youth, he strived to give enough
back, heaped the scale and failed: the day, at
four, recall, when ten times ten (and then
some) times telling you was insufficient
to convey the contents of his overbrimming
heart, because he thought you might
wander off into some nebulous boyhood notion
of life and be lost to him, or grow distracted
and forget. As if
you'd place hands over his wide,
anxious eyes in a test of object permanence
then neglect to remove them. Your boy was
laughably credulous in ways. Then came
the day he didn't depart for college
— bright boy burned out kind of
quickly, but guttered and sputtered and
re-ignited late in the strangest place —
and you did not wander nor forget one bit.
And you're still there, close.
Not grown apart but grown, he knows
the comedic nature of the Day of I-love-yous,
yet can't help thinking some of it
was anything but silly.