My Mom, d. 1994, and: Late Poem

152 CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER MY MOM, D. 1994 My wife is not my mom. My mom is not my mom. My father is not my mom. My boss is not my mom. She is a tooth with rot, a flower pressed between the pages of a lost book. My son is not my mom. She is a mare crushing my skull beneath her hoof. She is forever starved. I ride to the edge of the earth clutching her hair. Get it over with. It’s never ok, not ever. Fuck it, whatever. If Robert Frost is my mom, then so is Robert Lowell. She taught me to talk. She is where I’m headed, a bomb crater. She forgives me like a hunting hawk. Maybe she’s my boss’s boss, my wife’s other other lover, my son’s midnight cough. She loves me like a brother. 153 CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER LATE POEM I was alone inside a book as I’d wished. It was fifty years from now. I didn’t live that long. The book was lost, in an attic, a locked trunk, a storage space, under rubble. It was the last copy, the only. Immortality seemed a memory. My journals were lost or incinerated, those fervent transcriptions and wonderings and hopeful evenings, scripts for wild lives unlived, unloved had long since disintegrated. Whatever power I encoded had escaped and moved on. I was neither I nor eye nor lie. No one cared or could. Even what was left of me wasn’t. My bones were as brittle as a text, religious, with no teacher. Looking back, there was no future, no future. ...