Half Starts and Trail Offs

Today’s guest blogger is Jenny O’Grady, whose poetry I shared with you last week. She’s a professor at the University of Baltimore, where she teaches Literary Publications and Electronic Publishing. For her post, she’s sharing one of Mary Karr’s poetry. And now, without further ado…

I wasn’t a mother when I first read Mary Karr’s “A Blessing From My Sixteen Year’s Son,” but that didn’t matter. I loved how the violent first lines gave birth to the story of her offspring’s growth and all the uncertainties — hers, his — that seem to orbit naturally around teenagers. I loved the last line, spoken plainly by an unassuming cop. I read it over and over again from a dog-eared copy of 2005′s “The Best American Poetry.”

Now that I am a mother, I approach it with even greater awe. I feel a mother’s relief knowing her son has not only survived the car crash, but that he has become a man of backbone, strong of character at a most fragile moment. As a poet, I appreciate Karr’s direct language, her lack of mushiness, her containment of emotion in solid words and actions. She makes it seem so easy — the writing, not the mothering.

Two excerpts from “A Blessing From My Sixteen Year’s Son,” the beginning and the end:

I have this son who assembled inside me

during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared,

in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled.

Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras.

Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous.

Look at the muscled obelisk of him now

pawing through the icebox for more grapes.

* * * *

The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy

took it hard. He’d found my son

awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights,

where he’d draped his own coat

over her shaking shoulders. My fault,

he’d confessed right off.

Nice kid, said the cop.

* * * *

Read the full poem or hear Mary Karr read it here.