I’ve been under the spell of words (and the silences in which they bloom and fade) for as long as I can remember. This poem, from my collection Instead of Sadness (Gunpowder Press, 2015), says something about that obsession:
SAFE
I am six. I don’t like coffee,
but the smell of it drifting
up the stairs
along with breakfast-making clatter
means I’m safe.
I lie in bed, point
my toes, think about the secret
language I’m making, my list
of words and their meanings.
Today I’ll write them in the book
I plan to make with sheets
of my mother’s onion skin
typing paper.
The summer I turn
nine, my father will find
a bat, rust-colored and furred,
roosting among the loquats
in our back yard. The breathing
fact of a wild creature so near
will alarm and thrill me.
By then, my private
language will be forgotten,
not to be remembered until
I’m forty and look back to glimpse
myself in the amber
wilds of my childhood,
first and last speaker
of a snatch of language
without a name.
These days I write, teach, collaborate with my husband Rob, and dream of rain in California's San Joaquin Valley.
SAFE
I am six. I don’t like coffee,
but the smell of it drifting
up the stairs
along with breakfast-making clatter
means I’m safe.
I lie in bed, point
my toes, think about the secret
language I’m making, my list
of words and their meanings.
Today I’ll write them in the book
I plan to make with sheets
of my mother’s onion skin
typing paper.
The summer I turn
nine, my father will find
a bat, rust-colored and furred,
roosting among the loquats
in our back yard. The breathing
fact of a wild creature so near
will alarm and thrill me.
By then, my private
language will be forgotten,
not to be remembered until
I’m forty and look back to glimpse
myself in the amber
wilds of my childhood,
first and last speaker
of a snatch of language
without a name.
These days I write, teach, collaborate with my husband Rob, and dream of rain in California's San Joaquin Valley.