This was published a very long time ago in Tar River Poetry. I am now motivated to try to ascertain if Tar River Poetry still exists. [UPDATE: It does! Here’s the 30th anniversary issue--I published there almost 30 years ago.] It’s always so misery-inducing when spring is cold. I don’t care how much I love British mysteries set in cold, wet, beautiful places. I don’t want the place I live to be cold and wet and beautiful in APRIL. I want warm and wet and beautiful.
This was long before I met my husband, long before I had a son. But I was babysitting a lot. I’m curious now where these girls are. What happens to the children of writers with interesting names? (I actually am invested in that question now.)
I’m reading this tomorrow on WRCO, Richland Center’s radio station.
_____
GRACE
Hymns don’t work on this baby–only torch songs
bribe her fussing into sleep. I’ve planted
Lady Day deep in her downy head:
“Summertime,” mostly, though it’s a cold spring
in Montana, nowhere near humid enough for blues.
Her sister sleeps upstairs, rousing choruses
of “Amazing Grace” still bouncing off crib slats
like a holy mobile set loose.I stand guard, willing
my notes into warmth until the windows bead up
like a glass of tea, my voice ungainly
and stubborn as a weed. I don’t believe
nothing can harm them, but tonight nothing will.
______
“Summertime” is one of the songs I’ve always sung to my son. That and “Blue Moon.” I tried adding “Tennessee Stud” to the mix but I can never remember all the words. My husband sings a version of summertime that is medley with “Whipping Post.”
Two things strike me about this poem now (well, lots of things, but I have to save something for the radio show). First, this was before I started writing a lot of sonnets, but it seems to me this wants to be a sonnet. Second, I had nurturing to spare back then.
marniere 