Whole (Andrea Cohen)
Whole industries have sprung
from nothing, from someone
broken, crying: make me whole.
My brother, having broken
a green banana in half, held
the two snapped bits
up to my mother, who held
me in 1962 in the produce
section of the A&P, and holding
me (as yet unbroken), strolled, if
briefly, from my brother, pretending
not to know him, knowing his
inmost desire to be reunited
with a time before he knew me.
The cry insists: make me whole, as
if, made, we could be remade,
as if whole were a place
to point the golden Buick toward,
as if its station did not contain
chiefly the hole, the central O
of loss and going on.
~ Andrea Cohen
