Mentor
“death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.”
—Louise Glück
I tell my daughter first, because her knowing
forces it to become true. I have to leave dad.
Nothing is going to change. She nods
like a priest in a booth, the last fifteen years
staring down at us. Explains, softly,
how she’s spoken of me to her therapist.
Her worry of becoming my mirror. Tells me,
I remember you, mom, before him. You were happy.
Oh. Oh. To surrender to your death by someone else’s
hand is still a kind of suicide. Slower. I stand naked
on the porch as she recounts in perfect detail,
(in a poet’s detail) the very things I’d hoped
to disguise. My careful little spectator. Diligent neighbor
to my unnamed agonies. It is not ungrateful to resist
the tyrannies of obsession. It is no selfish act
to want, suddenly, to stay alive. My dear girl.
She is teaching and I am learning. I not only
want to be seen, I want to be seen through.
I return to my house, haunted and waiting.
I look into the mirror and notice the door.
Copyright © 2023 by Rachel McKibbens. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem was written several months after ending a long-term relationship. Poetry has always been a tool for me to shoulder my way out of an emotional trench. So many writers who came before me have unknowingly become my surrogate guides. Having grown up in a chaotic household, there was never a blueprint for grace or forgiveness or the simple acknowledgment of a difficult subject. ‘Mentor’ is about recognizing the transformative shift between a parent and their adult child, where stating something plainly is the best option, and listening closely is the best escape plan. This poem is for anyone looking for permission to get free.”
—Rachel McKibbens
Rachel McKibbens
