August 3, 2009

I Promise I Will Not Follow

This morning, I kissed my oldest daughter and walked past her little sister who was sitting in a high chair in the babies room playing with her sippy cup. She didn’t notice me slowing down for a last glance before I walked out through the double doors. When I turned for a moment to look back through the small square of tinted glass, my oldest was having her snack at the table. Walking home I thought of Larry Levis’s poem, “Blue Stones,” written for his son Nicolas. He says, toward the end:

But you? Little believer, little
Straight, unbroken, and tireless thing,
Someday, when you are twenty-four and walking through
The streets of a foreign city, Stockholm,
Or Trieste,
Let me go with you a little way,
Let me be that stranger you won’t notice,
And when you turn and enter a bar full of young men
And women, and your laughter rises,
Like the stones of a path up a mountain,
To say that no one has died,
I promise I will not follow.

My girls, young as they are, have their own interior lives brewing. I am rich for my nearly unbounded access to their thoughts and discoveries, and every day they become more themselves and some distance grows. I am so taken with who they are becoming and so grateful for the chance to know them so completely – for now.

3 comments:

  1. i am so glad that you are writing here. so glad to read your writing, and so glad to share in these thoughts, and so glad to be introduced to new poetry, and so glad that you are capturing these bits before they slip away.

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  2. I agree with everything Emily said. I was almost emarassed to reply because my writing is so inferior to yours. Looking forward to reading more!!

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  3. Thanks for sharing these. beautiful. simple. poignant. Love the idea behind the writing and the image of the twisted pipe cleaners.

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