FOR A FRIEND, WHOSE SON HAS BEEN ADMITTED TO AN INSTITUTION
By Michael Blumenthal
The dice-roll, and puckered lips, of the geneticists
and, with them, the unspeakable grief
for the now-madman circling about in your garden,
telling jokes to himself only he can understand
but he is your son, this seemingly crazy one
and the love of a mother’s milk knows no end.
Not even the secure walls within which they have
placed him, complete with pretty girls as unfocused
on this world as he is, can console you, whatever cookies
he may be served, they shall not be as lovingly made
as your own. How shall he be released from this,
the madness that transmogrified such painterly
and poetic gifts into the eerie laughter of midnight,
wild hands grasping for food like a starved animal?
Once he swam the length of the Lake, bicycled
more miles than any sane man would have found fit,
as if the body could perfect itself into a refuge
for stray thoughts, as if the vessels through which
blood coursed could arrive at another station.
Oh mother, friend, neighbor, who now exits
the stairs leading from the underground tunnels
onto sunny streets leading to cages for humans,
how shall a mother’s love endure when a child leaps
into the unknown netherworld of his own imaginings?
No training in bravery or kindness has prepared you
for this, the heart so heavy with its own offspring
that only some devious god must know how much
strangeness that heart can endure, or how much love.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Blumenthal.