Patricia Whiting Fine Arts

Maybe we were too alike
to get along.
Both too easily hurt.
Concealing our feelings
under a carapace of indifference.

She was a Norman Rockwell mother,
a Ladies’ Home Journal mother,
a stay-at-home, volunteer mother,
an Eisenhower Republican mother.
She was all I didn’t want to be.

She hated The Catcher in the Rye.

I was an astronomer of grievances
seeking out the black holes
of our universe.
Losing sight of the starbursts
of joy in our lives–

the fun we had together.
Mother, sister and I.
The paroxysms of laughter.
The confession after:
“I wet my pants.”

We needed only to catch
the other’s eye
for the giggling to begin.
It happened at the most
inopportune times.
Solemn occasions,
church ceremonies.

The only antidote:
self-inflicted pain–
the bitten lower lip,
the fingernail-gouged palm.

Maybe we were too alike
to get along.
Or maybe too different.

Our astrological signs
are said to stare
“self-consciously and uncertainly
across the Zodiac” at each other.
She is earth; I am water.

I asked of her
more than she could give.
But that wasn’t her fault;
it was mine for asking.