Our realities were merging to
Copulate and produce beautiful,
Upon the most beautiful
Of babies.
Have I not written enough for you lately?
My sincerest of apologies
Are found in the back pocket
Of my jeans…
Folded and tarnished
At the seams.
And you, my love,
How do you feel like one of
My childhood dreams?
Panned out in a panoramic
Timeline of memories and vacancies -
Spreading out limb by limb,
Shadowed by the feeblest of trees.
He’s not He.
And she..
Well,
She’s not she.
So these retorts broken by
Sunset have forever morphed
Into our child, so dear.
So innocent
Behind our steering wheel.
Steer -
Finally making all of these
Passed memoirs clear.
Gather your speed dials and make the call.
Gather your speed dials and make us all.
Time in this world is captured
By the swiftest of speed..
Swiftest of time lost..
Competing to whom can
Fight being alive
Faster -
Quicker -
More efficiently -
My baby cries in the night
To remind me to change her diaper.
I sometimes think there’s a racing
Habit that counters this notion..
Like the waves my virgin eyes awoke
To in March at the Northwest ocean
That just bring me back to
These fondest of motions.
My baby cries in the night
To remind me to change her diaper.
And I’m starting to think,
My sweet Ellie Mae,
Is slowly upon slow
Breaking shades of gray..
As her baby teeth and her
Baby tongue
Don’t have any words to say.
And maybe, maybe one day
My beautiful girl, Ellie Mae,
Will have a voice to sing
Will have thoughts to be provoked.
Will have more speed than
The fastest of jet planes.
I know now that that ink blot
Of spit upon her bib
Was shrugged off as a stain.
And that this pen on still paper
Will easily be construed
As the same.
The thought is just as
Terrifying as dandelions purring
In late May..
And how they count another
Tally on our weathered skin.
Our thoughts can be so thin.
Our thoughts can be so thin.
But my girl,
She will have beautiful,
Thin,
Ink ridden skin.
1 response so far ↓
1 mackenzie // May 26, 2008 at 6:41 am
Hey Berit,
What hits me in this poem are the sections about the baby. I take that as the core of it, and those parts all have me by the hand, taking me some where quiet and whispering and musical.
I like: “my apologies
are found in theback pocket
of my jeans,
folded and tarnished
at the seems.”
and also:
“spreading out limb by limb
shadowed by the feeblest of trees.”
But I think the poem realy starts with “My baby cries in the night…” and keeps going from there.
It’s where you hit your stride, where as the stanzas before seem distracted, like you were winding up but not to the poem yet. Maybe try to start from there and work those two earlier images in. The only things that felt off in the second part of the poem to me were in the 8th stanza, the lines “will have thoughts to be provoked./ will have more speed/than the fastest of jet planes.” falls flat. Also the dandelions. But the ink ridden skin, the questions about whether or when a child has something to say, that’s the crux of the poem, thats doing the work.
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