Life is often good. Sometimes, I write poetry.

Children’s Books

I stand small because
I am small, a young girl set adrift amidst an inky sea.
Today I am a tourist on the Dewey line: a traveler
through muck and mire, Grop and Puck and Judy Blum,
I am five again and unafraid to plumb
The recessed corners of this quiet, literary tomb.
I love to be where no one else will go – not the old folks
Who slouch and tear and stumble in from convalescent homes,
Not older girls and brazened boys making out
In Mystery – no, no, I am five again. None of this for me.
But I can’t fly now, and my heart can break.
What other things unseen have changed?
Down the steps and around the corner lies the Children’s Way.
It smells of dust now; on the red bench
I don’t remember, there’s a water stain
To mark the passage of these 20 years.
I take my hands out of my pockets and walk quickly. Two fingers
Seek each spine and date marking circulation,
each book with its own smell and its own fate.
Each stands for one life lived among the many, the how’s and where’s
Of all this mess never getting to the Why (or maybe finding ways to tell)
Of giant peaches and talking silkworms, lost dads and mums and time machines
With silent halls of great queens turned deliberately to stone.
Narnia, the Dwarrowdwelf, and Katmandu,
Western prairies, Lonely Houses, and (ach, my favorite!) Invisibility!, you too--
It’s always longer than I’ve meant to’ve gone away.
The sun is fading. It’s so quiet that I close my eyes.
The authors of a million chapters crowd about me
In the ceiling, near the grates below—a cloud,
a ghostly witness, a testament to Language, now their final home.
I imagine they are waving wildly to some small girl, still wandering.
We’ve not forgotten what it is you want to know:
It is still wonderful somewhere. We will tell you,
When we find out, how to get there and with whom to go.

These are my oldest friends; the Things They Carried
were beyond them, so they wrote them down.
From these stone walls, a quiet Bless the child sounds.
Bless the child; she will grow old and die. I make a silent promise
To take notice: it was some brokenness that made them gentle.
They bled, in ink, a kind but quiet love, and so will I.