Letter to Dylan

(My first wife and I had a child born with trisomy-13,
a very rare and very severe genetic birth defect)

I don't know where my tears
have disappeared to.
They've run away
like the dish and the spoon.
Maybe the faucet was
never turned on in the first place.
Maybe it's rusted dry,
and my grief,
black, foul and sticky,
is festering like a landfill
and gumming up the works.

My first clues that you were not
the rosy bundle I expected
were the delivery room looks
of startled dismay.
"It's cosmetic-it can be fixed"
they said, hiding you from view.

When the nurse presented you
through gritted teeth,
I did not know what I was looking at.
Was it a cabbage patch kid survivor
of some horrible industrial accident?

Where your mouth should have been
I saw a series of gaping, alien holes
and obscenely mangled flesh,
as if the creator, instead of
lovingly crafting the lips and teeth
that would have proclaimed
your glory to the world,
had wantonly punched into your face
with an ice pick
in a blind, drunken rage.

When your mother said
"Where's his ear?"
the room began to spin
like an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
I think it was at that moment
that a valve was turned inside of me
and the tender flow
waiting to enfold you
was stilled to an arid drip.

I stood as coldly stoic as Mr. Spock
and as numb as novocaine
while the so-called expert
stood in his pissed-off night-slippers,
icily reciting the accusatory litany
of your defects and deformities,
to the soundtrack of your mother
wailing banshee torrents
from the depths of her desecrated womb.

That night, your grandfather
slept in my bed
with his arms around me
as if I was the newborn
in need of comforting.

The next day, kinder doctors
with warmer eyes
revealed your agonized world to us.
Your poor, tiny brain,
like a sea-sponge washed up on shore
and picked at by wild birds;
a never-ending electrical storm
in a shook-up glass paperweight.

We took you home and fed you
through a tube
like some abomination
locked in a Victorian closet,
while the sunny world went by
with eyes averted.
Your mother and I
became weak and sick,
puking up the broken
eggshells, twigs and branches
of a violated nest.
Finally, we had to put you
in the hospital,
your bodily needs attended to
along with all the other
sad-eyed aberrations.

Four months later,
your mother held you swaddling-tight
as you took your last anxious breath
in this world,
and I'm glad I was able to love you
and see you, just once,
as something more than
a cruel and vicious joke
or a hideous mistake.

So now I'm wondering
what might have been
had that spanner not been thrown
into the chromosomal works.
Would you be a poet
like your namesakes Bobby Z.
or that famous Welshman?

You were a swan without it's trumpet,
and now I think I carry
your innocent, untried voice
next to mine,
snuggled cozily in my throat
like a bear in a blanket,
asking me,
as if for a bedtime story,
to always always speak the truth.

David Aronson
December 2005