April 19th

Man in a Parking Lot

When you have a son
you start seeing men
backwards, intuiting their childhood
selves beneath the years of accretions—
the bags and jowls, paunches,
thickened, crumpled skin,
the whole weight of the individual
personality, its freight of filters,
opinions, prejudices, habits,
likes, congealed—as if you knew them
before they even knew themselves.

So when a man stumbles toward you,
mumbling, across the Cubb's Foods parking lot,
unkempt and coatless in the snow,
and your discriminating mind says
"madman," "danger," though he never
once looks up, locked in an altered world,
fixed, unfixable, you lock your car door and then
sit there wondering how it happened,
when things started going wrong.
Knowing he was once a toddler—
for pity's sake—you find it
strange, unreal, this mane of wild
grey hair, grey beard. Somehow
you know it doesn't belong on him,
all that hair, and you don't know
how he got to be so lost, so sick, so old.

 

Catherine Jagoe

 

 

Comments

[Shelly]

I can't imagine a better way to describe the strangeness of raising a future man. Having a girl first bought me five more years to avoid thinking about this. My little boy is a part of my body- how is it possible that he will grow up to be so fundamentally different from me?

Darn it, Gina- just when I've re-convinced myself that I have no use for poetry, you introduce me to something that gets into my head! Have you considered a career as a high school English teacher when you're done with the domestic goddess thing?