Arra Lynn Ross

Day of the Child (eBook, ePUB)

A Poem

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

From Arra Lynn Ross, a tender, generous, and generative extended poem centered on the experience of parenthood.

"What is learned? I'll return for my son; / at school, at three thirty-eight, bells will ring & run / days over years." Using unpredictable syllabics, rhyme, and syntax, Day of the Child captures the sensation of altered time that accompanies a child's growth. Seasons come and go. A schoolboy becomes a dreaming infant becomes a five-year-old exploring metaphor for the first time becomes an ultrasound image, "a frieze on screen." A mother cycles through her own often dissonant identities: "soother, watcher, blame-taker." And both mother and child assume another, significant role: artistic collaborators.

For Day of the Child is a poem co-created by child and mother, offering a space in which each's stories, thoughts, words-"unbound / by Time & time's delineations"-tangle together. In which apartness-"Oh indivisible divisible," the presence of another heart beating inside the mother's own body-is continually negotiated. And in which the mother considers her place as intermediary between the child and the world: her protection, her complicity, her joy. Its octave pairs ebb and flow, expand and contract, producing a portrait of raising another human as refracted as it is circular, just as a river "breaks into many suns, the sun." For, as the child asserts, "love is a circl[e] round / as a Ball."

Challenging the notion that parenthood is not itself a poetic endeavor, Day of the Child makes of childrearing "a refrain I reframed each day with new words."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. November 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781571317506
• Artikelnr.: 63027166

Autorenporträt

Arra Lynn Ross is the author of Day of the Child and Seedlip and Sweet Apple. She is a poet, essayist, and puppet worker whose work has appeared in Passages North, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Birmingham Poetry Review, Antioch Review, and the Iowa Review. She lives in Michigan.

Inhaltsangabe

CONTENTS
a poem
[1] The time-passing: your waterproof watch reads
[3] derive not first from reason. Of Passion
[5] By the time you are five, we make metaphors
[7] You move too fast to catch, erasing, from mind
[9] Go back to the boy jumping in barn hay
[11] Again, morning's make: walking, a mother deer
[13] Uphold heaven-humble & hurting, here-rapt
[15] More magic: Morning. Choose a card, remember
[17] Early light winds loose the air balloon curtains.
[19] Inside me I saw your heart. Made visible
[21] Seven years blink: on river, rain's ink and bow
[23] made meal. Of butterflies & milkweed & moon
[25] My own: on the hard floor, refuses
[27] and dappled bay until the river, morning gray
[29] The thread thins. December. Paris
[31] -Fine snow settles on the locusts' fallen branches
[33] in plastic cups the milky liquid poured.
[35] Of what is made merriment? Or, Innate
[37] Until we make late February. Snow's
[39] In the Living Room, the staple gun claps
[41] I sing what you cannot hear in spoken words:
[43] A verb-poem. In winter, he writes: Blossoms
[45] September 21, 2012: you (five) over me rolled
[47] by what-you-would-become. Un-willed
[49] "With all my heart," nuzzling his bed head
[51] Spring blinks. Then, August's amber light. The cicada
[53] and the bright blue blurred, in air, away. Ancient chant
[55] The blue ball lies on the thick lawn, half-shadow
[57] If I could, again: us, on the back deck, in sun
[59] I waited for you to say you love me
[61] I had a lot of fun, but now I'm old and gray
[63] (would, of him, make a single blip) and trace
[65] Children, perhaps, more than any, know, their bones
[67] The butterflies are hatching in Dow Gardens'
[69] A day of hardness in the heart, though I run
[71] After dragging to Flagler's frog fountain
[73] Some redbud saplings have not, I think, made it
[75] as his father sifts for shark's teeth among shells
[77] I go far away, to write. To Belgium
[79] At nine, you come, most, to me, hurt or angry
[81] The Narrow roads I walk, outside Olsene
[83] when by me in the dusk my child sits down
[85] By your works shall ye be known, my paper-folder
[87] A kind of intoxication, rising up
[89] I hang, on the line, laundry's smell like wind.
[91] Near evening. Long-limbed, tawny, lacquered shadows
[93] Fever-gaunt, trembling, short of breath to speak
[95] me half-way down the gravel, rain-rutted, drive
[97] Learning to speak, you would mirror our words
[99] Big elephant hang up towel, you said