Upon Never Meeting the Woman Now Gone

She was kind to me, a man, a seed
Of things a man might be, a kid
Like all the other kids with whom
She, a mom, was bothered. Did

She have the tiniest clue what I
Looked like, how I was weird,
How I was, to myself and those who saw
Me, different? No, I disappeared.

She carried on without me. Wrote
More poems, won fewer awards, retired,
Was thrown by her horse as though
She were one more student of the men mired

In the embalming pitch of her last, black humor
That earned her later verse a place
In the software application of portable,
Potable poetry. But I was not me, and she is not she.