Reasons

Things are going as planned.  
My mother died.  
My father died.  
I am alive
and bound to fate

I recite the mantra to myself:  
"A father is fate,"  
drawing the Harrow  
along my fetid soul,  
turning over what was planted in me,  
digging up the weight of his will. 

But a counterchant arises, 
the one I will use 
as the border wall 
against this seeding: 
“A mother is the memory of mystery."
Her voice plants itself in the silence,  
a reseeding against the pull of his fate,
a defiance growing in the spaces he left behind.

Perhaps that is why my parents died the proper way,  
never knowing how the mystery  
of their three childless children’s lives  
would resolve itself.  
Perhaps they believed  
things left unresolved,  
questions left unanswered,  
were never meant to be—  
that silence itself was an inheritance.  

We were all improper boys in their eyes, 
following their path—
but only far enough to leave the family herd behind.
I was the easy one, 
the silent, observant child,  
the one who did not rebel,  
but carried no mystery or fate in him,
only the moral weight of a conflicting inheritance. 

 My father died in peace, 
leaving no holes in his life,
not even a burial, just his ashes.
And his boys with all 
the usual unresolved regrets, 
the proper amount of moral pain 
to grieve him properly.

My mother’s death was the pit
in the universe that opened up 
a thirty year hell in her sons. She left a mess-
sickly, poor, and with nothing to grant 
but her good memories and a moral clarity
torn to tatters by the unscrupulous.

The older took to drugs trying to give her justice.
The younger was too innocent of mind 
to truly know and care.  And as far as myself, 
the silent observant, middle one—

there are reasons 
good mothers die
and poems are meant 
to live forever—

there are reasons.