Love Is a Form of Recklessness

My mother is AWOL from God.
That’s what the nuns back
in Bristol are whispering,
though they’re not allowed
to speak her name or listen
to the radio, which keeps on
playing the Summer of ’64’s
number-one hit on the pop charts:
Dione Warwick’s “Walk on By.”

My mother’s left hand grips
the steering wheel and her right
rubs her chin as Dione belts
that line, “Oh, foolish pride...”
Mother’s Levis are still too
tight and her hair, snarled above
her neck and her heart’s a key on
a kite string. She left
the convent two years before

and still has nothing, not even
her baby. The alto horn cuts
in, Dione’s back-up, as my
mother, twenty-five and broke,
drives her parents’ Chevy back
to Long Island. I’m left in
Manhattan, seven days old and
clueless but panicky, because
I’d sensed her panic as she left,

her kisses a pillow pressed to
my mouth. Now she wants to change
the station, change her mind,
because chances are she won’t
recognize me if, years later,
I walk by her on the street. My
mother’s love is the strength
to walk and keep on walking,
drive and keep driving until

her daughter has learned to live
without her, until the day
a chance meeting is impossible
because she is forty-four and soon
will be dead. But my mother does
not see that far ahead. She merges
onto the L.I.E., reaches down,
turns up the volume on the radio,
and begins to sing along.

—Meg Kearney