#5 & #6 April 6, 2018 mm
The year of my first daughter, Jorie Graham’s Erosion—
I still have little time to read the stacks and piles, glean
an education that in the end does not surpass the births,
the babies who dropped from my closed heart, their
little fists wrapped tight to me like holding parachute strings.
More important, the breeze of each day, than who
had written what, before or around me, while I nursed,
cooked, wrote on the fly, little notebooks on Sunday
morning escapes, and the father, self-entertained, cooked
the pancakes and allowed these moments of walking free.
Bursting my skin with feminism I wouldn’t move far from
university, the geese and grass for them; the hallowed halls
and pedigrees for me. Released unto the world to twirl
my ways and words as—waiting minds lined up. Kids
one and all; the piles of books now whisper welcome lullabies.