Keeping my promise

Another day, another post.

Things are painfully slow at work for me right now, as Bossman is out observing the holiday. We didn't have much to do before he left, and all my manuscripts are in production, so I've got nothing to edit. Besides posting here, I'm looking at transferring the company emails from dreamhost to gmail, and reading a couple mediocre proposals. One on traveling, one on mixed martial arts. Neither things I'm going to recommend we publish.

I guess I'll spend tomorrow writing some copy. Sigh. My glamorous life.

I went to a poetry reading last night at the KGB Bar. Listened to Nicole Cooley and Kimiko Hahn, who were both pretty wonderful.

Nicole's done a lot of poems about flooding. Her last collection, Breach, was about Hurricane Katrina, and she's been working on a project called The Flood Notebooks about the flooding that happened in the Midwest this summer. I like wet poems, but sometimes listening to a person who keeps building on one thing over and over, it feels a little like they're capitalizing on disaster. And I know that's not what she was doing...she was born and raised in New Orleans, her parents stayed there while the storm hit. I can't imagine the choking terror she must have felt the whole time, not knowing if they were okay. Of course there's a lot running through her, a lot she feels the need to expel in her writing. Maybe it was just the sheer force of the pieces, the number of them that sort of overwhelmed me. I felt that way the first time I read Nick Flynn's Some Ether as well. It's a book of poems about his mother's drug problem and suicide, and after a while, I didn't feel like there was punch left in his poems. I didn't care about the subject and I wasn't interested, even though I recognized that it was horrible.

Kimiko, however, totally pushed my pleasure buttons. She's been drawing materials from the New York Times science section, really paying attention to language and exotic-sounding words. She read some poems about bugs and fungus and stars and family, and they were sweet and funny and digging. I felt good after listening to her. The final poem she read was called "Maude" and I cannot find it online. It was about teaching her daughter to go into astronomy, so she could name a planet after her mother.

Listening to them read really made me feel good about writing. I've been working on a poem of my own today, which I'll put in at the end of this post. Sometimes, when you read words on a page, you forget that poetry is aural and oral, that's somewhere in its past, poetry was song. And so when I heard those women sing out last night, I forgot all the hard parts of poetry, the struggling with syllables and line breaks, the worry of form and punctuation, and just focused on the sounds, the meaning, the big picture.

So. Here's what I've been working on:

Cycle

There are no mockingbirds in Maine,
nothing in the green to squat above and judge this scene.

The baby is slung over the cliff of my hip, his heels
digging spur-sharp into my back and belly.
My belly pitches and rolls like a seastorm
under his soft foot.

He is a weight against my bones, pulling me down
into screaming, into terror,
into love too fierce for words.
Into gasping.

I want to fold him into me.

His heat against me is like a light
an unexpected illumination. He makes me sore.
He burns like a sun. A son.

When I put him down, the storm slows,
but I can feel that plates have shifted.
The landscape doesn't look the same.

This is version 3 of this poem, and it's still in the works, but this is my poem for Sean, Tom's nephew who will be 2 in December.

There's still a lot of disconnect, a lot that I cannot put into words right now. Holding him was the sweetest thing in the world. He was heavy, sleepy, silent. He was desperate to be held, close and tight. I sang to him, and he buried his head against my throat, felt the words humming up. I swing him, hard and wild, was rewarded with laughing like bells. When he laid against me, he curled his sticky fist in my hair. He sighed and snorted like a piglet. Furrowed his eyebrows as I talked to him about all kinds of secret things. Grinned when I flipped him upside down and blew raspberries on his belly.

I didn't know, not really, that I wanted kids. I've always had fun with them, always been popular with the under 6 set. Over 6, and we get a little wary of one another, but once they hit 12 or so, we're back in sync.

That day, though, holding Sean while playing with about 9 other kids, keeping them calm in a somewhat crazy situation...I'm good with them. And maybe I have some crazy ideas about how and where I want my own kids raised, but I know now that I want them to exist. And I want to raise them myself, teach them, read to them, let them paint and sing. I want to revel in them.