Magi

By Brenda Shaughnessy b. 1970 Brenda Shaughnessy

If only you’d been a better mother.

How could I have been a better mother?

I would have needed a better self,

and that is a gift I never received.

So you’re saying it’s someone else’s fault?

The gift of having had a better mother myself,

my own mother having had a better mother herself.

The gift that keeps on not being given.

Who was supposed to give it?

How am I supposed to know?

Well, how am I supposed to live?

I suppose you must live as if you had been

given better to live with. Comb your hair, for instance.

I cut off my hair, to sell for the money

to buy you what you wanted.

I wanted nothing but your happiness.

I can’t give you that!

What would Jesus do?

He had a weird mother too . . .

Use the myrrh, the frankincense, as if

it were given unconditionally, your birthright.

It’s a riddle.

All gifts are a riddle, all lives are

in the middle of mother-lives.

But it’s always winter in this world.

There is no end to ending.

The season of giving, the season

when the bears are never cold,

because they are sleeping.

The bears are never cold, Mama,

but I am one cold, cold bear.

Source: Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)

Biography

Brenda Shaughnessy earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA from Columbia University. She is the author of Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), Human Dark with Sugar (2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Our Andromeda (2012). Her work has appeared in the Yale Review, the Boston Review, McSweeney’s, and Best American Poetry, among other places. With C.J. Evans, . . .

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