Sonnet For My Therapist

Dear Mary you cradle my arm as if it was your first child,
Balanced like a wipers squeak--less skate across a windshield.
Gentle beyond your touch, a secular nun undefiled,
Madonna smile beaming over the waving field,
Of baby-boom limbs breaking beneath illusory youth,
And children activated continuously by parental guilt.
Not things but we fall apart without mercy is truth,
Yet from all disasters something gentle is spilled.
From your face I glean the tender professional,
The marriage of wife and worker, action and words,
The goodness that isn’t granted from confessionals,
But ventures into the world intoxicated by the cured.
No earth mother, just attentive suburban wife,
Far lovelier than a model in this painful life.