He Had a Terrible Childhood
my mother tells me, and proceeds
to elaborate at gruesome length.
But don’t all gods and heroes get off
to a rocky start? Young Theseus thrashed
in his fish shack, Zeus sent abroad to avoid
being lunch for his dad. I am twelve
and obsessed with Greek myths.
I won’t repeat the gory details
of my mother’s story here, but the gist
is, faced with the madness of monsters who
were his parents, the god in our basement
made his mind a labyrinth
and retreated inside it, where he invented
everything but the way out. I felt it
the first time I met him, shying away from him
as a horse does a broken bridge.
Though in time I learned to cross it—home
was on the other side: my mother, shelter, bed.
Do you think I shouldn’t have married him?
she asked me once. It must have been
my senior year of high school. I kept silent.
Like Cassandra I had a knack for sight
yet there was nothing I could have said.
