POEM
Reading to the Children
The first child asks me: Are these poems yours?
The second asks: Where do you get ideas?
The third child says: I have always loved poems.
The fourth child wonders: What makes poems poems?
The fifth one asks: Which of them is your favorite?
The sixth one asks me: Is there ice cream later?
The seventh child asks: Is a poem dreaming?
To the first, who now fidgets with her hair,
inspects her nails, her dress, who may, in fact,
have little need to know what she has asked,
for whom the question, as well as the answer,
may well prove merely one more temporary
distraction in a day filled with distractions,
I say: Yes, these are poems I have written.
I could read no one else’s half so clearly,
with as much feeling, as I read you these;
that, more than anything, may be what I would
leave with you, feeling—music, of course, meaning,
certainly, but first feeling, feeling foremost.
The second child, holding his head to one side
as he speaks, pokes a finger in his ear,
looks at me as a child looks at “a poet”
who may never before have seen a poet,
seems in need of an answer to his question,
an answer I do not have, yet I answer:
I may not know where an idea comes from;
perhaps for days a phrase repeats itself,
perhaps a title, words which, isolated,
lack all meaning (“blue plums”); or situations
present themselves which seem, somehow, imbued
with those lights, half-lights, shadings, which address you
intimately, beyond all explanation,
whispering in your ear of resonance,
promising difficulty, complication.
I am able to glimpse, half-glimpse, its contours,
feel the weight it displaces (dimly, vaguely).
I am moving from darkness into darkness,
from mystery to deeper mystery;
what I see seems no plainer, seems no clearer,
the deeper I go, than it seemed, but rather
infinitely more complicated, darker.
If my answer succeeds in making nothing
simpler than it was, fails, utterly fails,
at illumination, it will convey
an approximation of my own state.
The third child smiles, nods her head up and down,
this way and that, assenting, acquiescing,
wanting me to agree, needing to hear
I, too, the poet, too, “always loved poems.”
I am unable to confess that to her.
To the nodder I say: I did not love them
for what may well have been too long a time.
Apart from jingles we were taught at school,
I did not know just what a poem was,
what poetry might be. Only much later,
having by will, with effort, I suppose,
struggled to lead myself directly to it,
to bring myself to it, at last confront it
(convinced, I now suspect, I needed, needed,
to know what poems were, or poetry),
applied myself—what philosopher said
“It is all a matter of application”?—
read poet after poet, some too facile,
some too windy, some few whose lines I cherished,
those who drew me closer and closer to them.
I have not, I admit, “always loved poems,”
but those I came to love I live with, fiercely.
To the fourth child, sitting cross-legged before me,
light-haired, green-eyed, quite puzzled, Lady Wisdom
in a reflective mood, sensing which questions
beg to be asked, which never need be asked,
wanting, as any bright child wants, to know
why what I have been reading are called poems
(rather than maps, or cats, or inundations),
I convey, once more, doubt, uncertainty.
These are poems because I call them that,
because, when I think of them, I think “poem.”
Should it please you to call them something else,
cucumbers, avocados, I accept that:
what you will name a poem is a poem,
becomes a poem, in the act of naming.
If this seems arbitrary to you, lacking
precision, the sheer weight of scientific
provability, it will have succeeded
in translating something of our dilemma.
We begin in ignorance, move through darkness
into the darkness, end in ignorance.
Poems are that, precisely: expeditions
mapping terrain where we have never been,
the landscape of the country of our blindness.
The fifth child, wearing white shorts and a smile
from here to there, and past that, wanting neither
the feel of things, their tone, their texture, nor
the consolations of exactitude,
statistics which, in time, attach themselves
to the object, whatever its name, under
scrutiny at the moment, asks my favorite
(as though that mattered), could as well have asked
the exact height and weight of each, how many
teeth each possesses. This is my response:
After completing “A,” I liked it, liked it
better, perhaps, than what had come before it,
but when “B” seemed to drive a little further
into the dark surrounding it (a progress
meager, at best, those slow, minute advances
barely perceptible at such close range),
“A” was replaced by “B,” however briefly.
Now I feel about “B” that it may have said
too much and, at the same time, said too little,
went not as far as, once, it seemed to go,
not as deep as perhaps it might have gone.
Each poem seemed, just finished, what I wanted,
thought I wanted, viewed from this distance, middle-
ground, back-ground, none seems what I had intended.
The sixth child blinks his eyes, swivels his head,
left to right, right to left, then rolls his tongue,
smacks his lips, makes a sound one-part delight
to one-part sheer boyish anticipation.
In the light of the values he assigns,
fails to assign, reminded once more of
the place of words, the homelessness of words
(“Words, in the end, words alone, are what matter,”
that philosopher said, or might have said),
I feel it necessary to respond:
Ice cream? Of course there will be ice cream later,
more flavors than you knew existed, cookies
shaped like cottages (plumes of chocolate coiling
from crumb-top chimneys), candied apples, plum tarts.
By the time the desserts are brought and passed
(I suggest this for your consideration,
no more than that, one possibility
among the many which may offer themselves),
what you have heard (and, hearing, felt) may well seem
more astonishing than the crisps, the pastries,
the butterscotch napoleons, the rum balls,
mocha parfaits, coconut wafers, jam cakes,
the goblets of vanilla-laced-with-mangoes,
brought on trays from the pantry. One can know that
only at the conclusion, having sampled,
one by one, what was deftly laid before you,
poems read, plates passed, music heard, half-heard,
a judgment reached, or not reached, a choice made.
The seventh child addresses principles
fundamental, it would seem, to the context.
This seventh child has learned what I have not:
how not to be seduced by strains of music
glimmering in the words, above, beneath,
by floats, delights, whips, fizzes, freezes, sundaes,
concern for logic, reason, meaning, order,
for the demands of shapeliness, proportion.
He scans the sky with those dark eyes, he calls
a bird by its true name (a “ring-tailed swallow”),
he claims to hear the pounding of the surf,
the sweep of rain across the dazzling air,
although the sea lies days and nights from here
and storms have not been forecast for tomorrow.
I answer awkwardly, and yet I answer:
I hesitated when it was proposed
I read to you from poems I had written,
not because I would have denied you music,
not because I would not have had them touch you,
could they have touched you, but because my dreams
now seem the subject, have become the subject.
To read these poems to you is to tell you
what I dream, what my name is, who I may be.
Last night I dreamt a poet read to children,
seven children, each of whom asked a question
having, for the most part, to do with poems.
The lines the poet read were his responses,
his attempts at responses, to those children,
each of his answers asked more than it answered.
The poet wore my face, his clothes were my clothes,
the voice was mine, pitch, range, inflection, timbre,
the dream-words in that dream-speech were these words.
I was the man who stood before them reading,
you were the children, you, the seven children.
These were the lines I dream-spoke, line by line,
this was the poem, this, the very poem.
Herbert Morris, “Reading to the Children” from The Little Voices of the Pears. Copyright © 1989 by Herbert Morris. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: The Little Voices of the Pears (1989)
