Memory of a Car Crash

I have wept now these whole thirty long years

Dating from this very first day of your ever living death

Yours and our dearly beloved son’s

Hoping desperately that it was something really:

The argument coarsely fervid and unconsequential

Which for that fleeting fatal moment dislodged my focus

Swerving our car from its uncontestedly clear and tarred bearing:

Hoping that it was something important really

Something that quite justifiably should unhinge a man

That quite justifiably should draw from me

These whole thirty death-long years of torrential tears

Being my first after the full two scores and seven years

Of my uncommonly dry and tearless days

Something that quite justifiably should ensnare me

In these eternal yearly cycles of fixing the very car

And breaking then again the very same car

That swept you and our dearly beloved son

Away into this unrelenting land of your ever living death

In the desperate, and silly, and fervent hope

That fixing and putting together all its scattered bits and pieces:

The crashed side mirrors and windscreen and rear-view mirror

The crumpled bonnet and doors, and the cracked dashboard

Clumsily dangling the broken tiny ceramic statue of the Madonna and Child:

That scrubbing and painting it exactly its old rust-grey colour

To look exactly as on this first day of your ever living death

Will fix me back you and our dearly beloved son

But all these annual cycles of workmanship fix me nothing

Except this accumulated freshness of your thirty-year long living death

That I begin afresh breaking the ever fraudulent car

In the same desperate, and oh blind defiant hope

That the next fixing escapade will perhaps fix me perhaps fix us, as of old

In the hope that the accumulated pathos of my tears

Gaining the uncommon high frequency and severity

Of these terribly lingering late September rains

Will perhaps animate the thirty-year long ceramic indifference

Of this remainder relic of the Madonna and Child

Hanging now from the rear-view mirror of our car

With the old vaunted clemency of the ever glorious and blessed Mary

Being posted there in the first place to deliver us from all dangers

To make up for these whole thirty long years of despised tearful petition.