First Tooth

For weeks, Ella, I have been absently fingering your gums, feeling for the inevitable, and so it shouldn't have surprised me this morning when I reached my thumb in and felt the sharp of your first tooth. On Sunday, after playing outside, your sister came in and handed me an acorn so flawless it seemed more like a piece of art called "acorn" than a real acorn. It is tooth-hard and perfect brown, and I can't for the life of me imagine how an animal might squirrel itself in to get at its meat. Now, it rains, and you sleep, and I think of all the foods you'll touch with that one perfect tooth: of the avocado I gave you around lunchtime and the bananas I'll feed you in the morning, of the Cheerios that will come and the peas and the candy. In graduate school, I had a friend who seemed always to dream of losing her teeth, and she recounted those dreams as we walked the city streets: she had coughed, she said, and when she looked into her palm, it was filled with teeth. In Chinese culture it is sometimes said that you lose a tooth for every lie you tell. Maybe now, sweet girl, with the thunder, I am wondering if you have given me some truth with this one new tooth. In just a few days, I return to work; already I ache for you.

Remembering Why I Teach

Today I drove in the rain to the Bronx where I taught poetry to children at the School for the Visually Impaired and Blind, and a boy named Infinite wrote of his love for music, of how the beat keeps him alive; and another boy wrote of the sound of thunder, how it reminds him of the warmth of his grandmother's house in Guyana; and then there was a girl named Armani who wrote an ode to her closet; and another kid who wrote of how his mean, toothy dog was as silent as a ghost and as prideful as his father.

Towards the end of the morning, when  the rain seemed to be slowing, there was another boy who wanted, he wrote, nothing more than to sleep on a poem, to bury his head inside of it and enter the endless dreamworld. Now back in Brooklyn, I still hold José in my mind, see his fingers running across his braille page, hear the lilt of his voice while he reads about words: so soft, he says, and safe.

Summer Dream

All spring I was awash in the milky bliss of new motherhood, and now July is here, and I wake up rubbing my eyes, confused by how time is seemingly linear again. In those blooming months, I was twelve and a hundred, and my daughters had never been born and were already old. Red bandannas were tied to fig trees; rooms opened to other rooms; tender buttons slipped into even tenderer buttonholes.

This is to say: this morning I'm not quite sure how to be in this world.

A few years back, I opened a magazine and saw that there was a story called "How to be a Person." I was giddy with the thought of it. I flipped to the page and started poring over it until realizing, with great disappointment, that it was not, in fact, a pamphlet for being; it was fiction.

Last Thursday, after K missed her train because she couldn't find the stairs to get her to the other side of the track, we drove towards the ocean because the girls had fallen asleep in the backseat. On the way to the ocean, driving around the bend, we hit a deer. She was fine, I think, jumped the fence and ran off, but in the heart-tripping seconds after hitting her, I remembered what I first thought was a dream and then thought was a story but finally remembered was neither. It was something that had really happened. In high school, riding in Brooke's car, there was a dog in the road. It was getting dark. We didn't stop. Do you remember that short story about dogs? I asked K. About having to incinerate them? She remembered, of course, but it was a novel, she said,  a novel about more than just dogs. I need to start writing again, I told her, and she nodded and looked into the rear view mirror.

Before the air even started smelling like the sea, Ella woke, and I knew she was hungry, so I turned the car around, away from the ocean, and we drove back to the yellow house where I nursed E until she fell asleep again, her eyes fluttering with her very own dreams.

From Jeanette Winterson

When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language--and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Shiny Silver Love

When Eva was a baby I couldn't stop talking. Look, baby. This is a window and that is the sun and that is the sun through the window. No, that's not right: that is the light of the sun coming through the window. The sun, baby, is hot and yellow, (very hot. can you say hot?) all plasma and magnetic fields, and it is very far away but not so very far away. There are things further than the sun. Many things, some things. And this is your nose, and these are your eyes, and the window is a rectangle, and if you put your hand here where the sun was pressing, you'll feel the heat. Touch, baby. With Ella, things are much quieter. I can stare at her all day. I can let the sun be, let it come up and go down and come up again. I decided early on that the only thing I really need to teach her is love. On the days I feel like talking it gets messy: "Now, love, I love you, and now, love, I'm making sissy-love a peanut butter and love sandwich, and I'm slicing a love-apple with this shiny silver love and pouring a big ole glass of love and drinking down all that love, and yum yum, I'm going to get me some more love, love." But on the days I'm not afraid of the quiet, it feels just right. Love.

Spring

Eva stood in the doorway holding petals in her palm. Cherry blossoms, mamma, she said though they weren’t, but they were pink, and the sun was coming in, which it has been doing this spring, all spring, coming in rich and full. But that can’t be true; maybe it’s just this moment that it’s so rich and full. Of course there’s been rain: it is, after all, April, and the other day at the discount store, the one on the corner that Cody threatened to burn down the summer he quit smoking, when I was buying things I didn’t want to buy, things you have to buy right after you have a baby, and the baby was starting to fuss, Eva suddenly looked up at me with her teary blue eyes, and I knew it was coming, as if she had been holding it in forever, and she just peed and peed while I watched the darkness spread across her pink leggings and run down into her Hello Kitty rain-boots, and since I don’t remember arguing about how there was no need for rain-boots on a perfectly sunny day, and since I do remember, once we got outside, taking off each of her boots and pouring them into the gutter where a tiny stream already ran, there must have been rain. It must have been slicking these dusty Brooklyn streets. It must be responsible for all this mad blooming.

Ella Cole Callihan

born April 4, 2012

8 lbs, 11 ozs

Mamma is swooning...