Roger Hecht
Poem in which you weren't conceived but the thought of you was
The reasons not to fuck are legion,
most of them logistic, involving
time, distance, exhaustion,
or drunkenness. Perhaps your mother
was with a different man & I was in
some dark hole. Or we had not yet met,
or not yet compared notes on each other’s
mothers’ respective or impending deaths
at that coffee shop, & were still weeks away
from hugging after the reading,
from putting off the movie
to pull each other’s clothes off
before later going to the restaurant.
& there are reasons, when the fucking
is frequent, frantic, esoteric, & ecstatic
not to desire conception,
mostly involving economics, career goals,
or mental & emotional competence.
& haven’t you read the news lately?
I mean, take your pick: war, disease,
poverty, ecological collapse.
Back in the day how could we fathom
that lighting a blaze in a winter hearth
to warm our naked skins in the light of wine
would later set off firestorms & floods?
& so you may wonder
not how we could have made this world (moot point)
but why we brought you into it.
So do I. Then & now. But there I was
in the breakfast aisle of that
desert grocery store, paused with my cart
before the syrups & cereals
not contemplating the sweet stuff
but merely passing through,
when I turned & saw from a distance
a girl, just a toddler or a tad older,
reach from her metal fold out seat
toward a wire basket overflowing with
stuffed white angora cats.
Her mother plucked one off the top
& placed it gently in her hands. She beamed.
It could have gone so many ways:
the mother could have snatched back the cat,
the father could have materialized with his big firm no,
the child could have serenaded the store with shrieking fits.
It could have gone so wrong. So many ways
to be disappointed, as usual. But no. Instead
the seed of simple desire spontaneously felt
then satisfied in a simple exchange, a happiness
I often denied my underserving self.
That child’s radiant joy. It blew aside
the rigid bounds of all sense of abnegation
& nearly sent me into unspeakable weeping
over my cart of mushrooms & cheap avocados.
That white cat, that light
at the end of a dark black hole.
I wanted you so badly
so I could give it to you.