All I Want
after Raymond Carver
today is not to remember everything I’ve
done wrong. I’m eighty-two and the list
is long. I can’t bear to hear the clang of bad
decisions, to claw back the days I broke things,
woke up scared, drove to New Hampshire,
Cape Breton, New York. The time I asked
my son to tell me what it was like growing up
with us and he did and I could not stop crying
even during the birthday dinner. The mistake
of that question, all of them before it. My husband
says I was a great mother but I doubt him. I
yearn to return those boys to my womb. Start over.
All I ask is to be unplugged from this ragged
remembering, this catalogue of redecoration,
raise one son from the dead, the other from
wherever he’s gone, to wrap us all in restoration.
Until then I’ll try to stride through my next years,
maybe learn more about what love isn’t, how to
look straight at the terrible and sing.
*
Sharon Charde practiced family therapy for twenty-five years as a licensed professional counselor and has led writing groups for women since 1992. She has won numerous poetry awards, has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and has been nominated ten times for the Pushcart award. The BBC adapted her work for an hour-long radio broadcast in June 2012, and she has seven published collections of poetry, the latest in September 2021, “The Glass is Already Broken,” from Blue Light Press. Her newest collection, “What’s After Making Love,” will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025.
From 1999 to 2016, she volunteered at a residential treatment facility teaching poetry to adjudicated young women, creating a collaborative group with a local private school for eleven of those years, and her memoir about that work, “I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” (Turner Publishing) was published in 2020. Charde has been awarded fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation and The Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Lakeville, Connecticut with her husband John.
This is really beautiful. The last lines come so swiftly and terribly. They are perfect. I have a question: what is the Raymond Carver reference? I’m curious. (thanks)