Nathaniel, Nearly (Poetry)

Oh Nathan, you are lost to me,
the father that I planned for you
has found a different destiny,
now every month’s a wasted egg,
the prophecy of dreamtime’s gone
and pain produces nothing but more pain...

My little one, the best of me
would find in you a last escape,
a chance to balance all the wrongs
with your nativity.

The fantasy of you in me
has long sustained a fragile hope
that I could someday give the world
a perfect, golden child.

And you exist, undead, unborn,
unseen by any other eyes
but mine — a mother’s vision knows
exactly how you’d be

from top to toe and how you’d grow,
my smiling love, my best-produced
solution to the emptiness
that threatens, swallows whole

whole dynasties of embryos
waiting patiently in line
for fate to call them, beckon forth
the chosen from the plain.

Time has ticked away the chance
to plan again, and circumstance
denies us room to meet as flesh
and test the blood we share,

combine our air and water signs
in other spheres, the vision holds
vivid, as warm thoughts run cold,
cured of foolishness...
Pre-natal ghost, I feel your pulse
so nearly matched to mine.