Tearing up My Mother's Letters

Diane Wakoski

I understand, now, what that enchantment is, though.
It is being loved.
Or, conversely, loving so much that you feel loved.

and that, unlike all my other pieces of mail, which I file,
as I answer (or decide not to answer), I tear up
my mother's letter
in her fine bookkeepers' handwriting,
recalling that I have always saved most friends' letters,
but always torn up family ones.

Just a note.
The rain has stopped. I
go out on the balcony to check my plants. The sweetpeas
are leaning out into the night. Lightning flashes, quickly,
like the pain which slithers in and out of my right knee
  during
crosscountry drives.
I tear up my mother's letters
because she is a sad woman and has given me
the gift of her sadness.
The words so thin and determined,
reminding me of how seriously we all take our small lives.
And I am ashamed of her letters;
they could be written by me,
that part of me I could never love,
the small, frightened, even stupid part,
determined to be noticed,
when it should rejoice in being ignored.
That too-loud voice which always embarrasses me
in a quiet room.

I tear up her letters
as I have tried to tear that part
out of me.