Poet's Choice

the sad circles disappeared, she blinks

before she knows me. I have listened

to one million breaths of her. And every night

my body seizes when she leaves to go

where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.

Harwell's frustration leads her to examine how she implanted the daughter's clinginess since her own body seizes when the child finally "leaves to go/where I am not."

The form of the poem replicates the paradox of the situation. The first stanza has two end rhymes: rOll/fOld -- a pattern of matching that devolves into deliberate half-matching and finally unmatching ends of lines: bEat/bEing; awAy/HAdes; waKes/blinKs. In the last stanza, there's a perfect twinning: "she leaves to GO"/"I urge her, GO."

On an unconscious level, this final replication exceeds the early rhyme but also thwarts it when the two sounds become identical (as the mother and daughter must not). The mother's relief at the child's departure ultimately prompts self-indictment for ordering the girl into Hell.

Without such boundless rivers of guilt, maternal love would be cheap stuff. Hardly worth celebrating.

(Sarah Harwell's poem "Dead" appears in "Three New Poets:Sarah C. Harwell, Farah Marklevits, Courtney Queeney." Sheep Meadow. Copyright 2006.)

Mary Karr's most recent book of poems is "Sinners Welcome."