October 6, 2009

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between tress, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

"Beginning" by James Wright



Late June, 2009. Iowa City. Anjali drives Dan and Rebecca and I out to where the farmhouse used to be. The farmhouse where Anjali and I lived during our first year in the Workshop. Now there is no house, no hole, no outline of a foundation even. There is corn and there is grass. Anjali parks on the grass and we cross the dirt road to stand at the edge of a field of soybeans. Rationally, I know they are fireflies, but if I was a six-year-old girl I would be certain it was fairy dust, hovering and shimmering in the twilight. Across the tops of the darkening plants, moving into and out of their own light, millions and millions of them. As though the stars, come down to rest awhile, could not stop from yawning. Thisbe, it was beautiful. You were inside me.

Today I look through "The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry" to find a line to give you and it all seems dunked in gray. Age, loneliness, closed mill towns and loose floor boards; a sullen wife and panic rules. I do not want to give you any of this.

But each day you are getting closer to all of this. It is horrible and beautiful to watch knowledge come into you. Today, in the gray and rainy light of 8am, you reached with your small fist toward your father's face. You lay beside one another in bed; you touched his eyebrow, his cheek, his hair. You are most interested in borders, the place where one thing ends and another begins. When you see me your cry quiets slightly. You know me (the scent of my breasts, the timbre of my voice, the outline of my jaw) in ways that I do not know myself.