Origin Story

^{for Sean Ferguson}

The mother laid her boy to sleep
in a laundry hamper. Its weave curved 
around his head just as the glow 
of a dying planet had curved 
around Kal-El, another boy ejected 
into space. Buckled into 
the seat of her stationwagon, 
the hamper traveled north, as far 
from the panhandle as Ephrata, Washington, 
no father for miles. For her boy 
his mother packed the stroller, 
a painting, and all the towels 
in the damp rowhouse near the airforce base. 
For her boy she drove eleven days. 
Now the boy is forty, he lives 
in LA, he’s learned to love 
without caution. She lives alone, 
she attends church twice a week. 
The minister argues that hers 
is a heroism of the natural order 
overthrown: the patriarch gone mad, 
the son preserved to replace him. 
Yet the mother sees the little stories 
curtained by the great. She is certain 
that, during those eleven days of driving, 
she was mythic. They were mythic. 
Mary and Christ. Jessica and Paul. 
Heroine and hero, together in flight.