Your mother drops you
on 11th and 1st to meet me
(as if I can help).

The backseat bounces with bare potential
your brothers: two and four, carseated and unsure
what more days of limited ways
might mean.

Later, walking you home,
you say you will go ahead alone
(some quietness about making your way
through the maze)
and I am left to turn
on wearing heels (my greatest qualm)
to meander through
this single story discourse
of warm homes, I come from
one chapter after another
world turning the way it should.
How is it that you should be protecting me
when it should be you
who I can guard?

But your mother has lived
many times more
than I’ll ever have to handle
(in half the time)
all because she was born
a mile north
or east or west or south,
or somewhere
inconsequentially close.

We circle her magnet
reading around confinements
into margins she leaves
to you like flowers
hoping we will sprout
a garden.

On the corner,
someone’s perfume smells like narcissus,
and a staggering woman wears a fake gold chain.

“I think you can be President too,”
I call after you.

But you are gone
and I am spinning again
seeking directions on fertilizer
to a place where negative capability will bloom.