Just after she’d learned to walk, my 15-month-old daughter and I spent a cloudy afternoon at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.  Her favorite animals were the birds that wandered the grounds because she saw she could send them into flight by toddling towards them.  A day later, we saw ourselves in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  A reporter had photographed us for a human-interest shot to help readers get through the dark Northwest days.  My daughter was bundled up in a knit jacket. Her corduroy Health-Tex pants were smudged with dirt at the knees.  Her white woolen hat with the long tassel that fell in her eyes was tucked beneath the jacket’s hood, and her mittens dangled on strings from her sleeves.   I stood a foot or two away from her in a padded ski jacket and wool cap, watching her chuckle at a rooster who stood like a parade marshal beside four female pheasants in a line.  I noticed a male pheasant in the picture that I hadn’t noticed when we stood there at the zoo.  He was behind the females with his head peeking around the top of my daughter’s. Within days, I conceived a son, who was born the month his sister turned two.

Over the year and a half that followed his birth, between nap times and diaper changing, nursing, preparing meals, and working as a parent educator at a vocational school, I listened to my daughter talk and talk.  She said, “You have breasts that I call onions.”  She asked, “Does a snail ever forget its shell?”  She recounted a dream:  “Mommy ran like raindrops and floated up to the sky.  She hung her umbrella up on a cloud and fell back down to earth watering the flowers.”  Listening to her words, I remembered that thing in me that had seemed to awaken after I brought her home. I had looked into her eyes and asked her who she was. I heard words inside myself, as if she had said them, “Who are you?”

Now, looking for time away from  diapers and Sesame Street, strained peaches and Mr. Rogers, I picked up a copy of the University of Washington’s Free University class listings.  The catalog listed a poetry writing workshop taught by Michael Magee, MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.  I had a B.A. in English literature and I had loved reading poetry. During college, books of poetry seemed to always fall into my hands whenever I visited the bookstore. Just as my daughter was saying poetic lines, so was I hearing lines of my own as I walked, as I washed dishes, and as I fell asleep. I liked the sound of them, but I had no idea what they meant. I’d read a lot of poetry, but I didn’t know how someone wrote a poem. I didn’t know you could receive a degree in writing. Still, the phrases demanded I write them down:  “the hint of gin in juniper,” “the iron blue charity of reservoirs, ” “between the glow times, bodies of fireflies against the night like unlit portions of the moon.” Maybe if I learned something about how poems are made, I would know how to write from these kernels that intrigued and mystified me.  Maybe I would find out something about why I was hearing them.   Maybe I would learn something about who I was.

One night a week for eight weeks, Michael Magee led our small group of six seated on the lawn outside of campus buildings.  We responded to each other’s poetry-in-progress using a language Michael taught us.  Are the endings earned?  Do the images build a matrix for the feelings of the poem?  Are the metaphors accurate both to the literal and the figurative experience the poem wants to explore?  This language led us to sift the ore of our poems for openings where we might put words that had not yet arrived.  I learned that the phrases I had been hearing might be a kernel and appear in some way in a poem, or they might spark a poem but not appear in the poem at all.  These phrases were a search I was making through sound and metaphor to find out what I thought and felt and had to say and discover. Michael Magee gave us poetry writing ideas and the expectation that we would have something to share with our classmates the next week.  He gave me the knowledge that there were more poetry teachers available where I lived—those who taught him in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.  At the end of the sessions on the lawn of the University, I was curious about studying inside the buildings. David Wagoner was on the faculty.  I recognized his name from an anthology called Some Haystacks Don’t Have Any Needle, which I had used while teaching seventh graders before I had children.  I applied to the University for admission as a non-matriculating student so I could study with him and I was accepted.

Once in the classroom, I quickly learned that if you a person who was serious at all about your work, rather than filling in electives, you didn’t study with David Wagoner right off the bat.  He was renowned, the editor of a prestigious literary quarterly. Most of the students had learned first from other poet-professors, studying with them for far longer than I had spent with Michael Magee. David Wagoner and those students eager to win his respect ruthlessly criticized my beginning efforts, but somehow I was unwounded. Learning that few students in the class cared what I had to say about their poems since I was new and unpublished did not diminish my happiness.

It didn’t matter to me that others didn’t feel I belonged. I had found a place where I still felt at home, where no matter how harsh criticism felt, how un-listened to I was, I was called to encourage full manifestations from my mere beginnings. I could witness this happening in myself and in others. Writing poetry was going to help me find out who I was (and I would show my children).

David Wagoner told us if we were to learn to write well, we must make it our business to read nearly every poem written in the English language.  It didn’t seem possible to reach this goal, but every step along the way was important.  I read poets I resonated with, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Erica Jong, and Maxine Kumin, as well as the work of David Wagoner and his peers Richard  Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, James Wright and their teacher, Theodore Roethke. I read Oregon’s William Stafford and my old favorites from college, John Donne, William Wordsworth and William Carlos Williams.

The first poem I completed in the class was the first poem I sent out for publication when I learned about a call for submissions from the University of Colorado’s Writer’s Forum:

My Mother Was Here Today

My mother was here today to try on the children
like garments in Bloomingdale’s,
her praise stalking them for lines to flatter her,
while coins spilled from her fingers and perfume
crowded the heavy aroma of feelings.

Near the light my daughter crayons.  I concentrate
by the window where silver dollar plants
and bear grass arrange my eyes.

“Emily,” I ask my daughter, “what shall I
give to a 50-year-old woman who makes
my eyes suddenly hard as diamonds?

Earrings, I am thinking.

“Mom,” my daughter asks me, “what can I draw
for a 29-year-old woman
who knows I won’t do a flower or a truck?”

We decide on a girl dangling from the moon.
Spreading arcs of yellow my daughter
works to make the sky larger.

When the journal’s editors accepted the poem, I was flung into misery.  My fellow poets assured me that my mother didn’t read Writers Forum from the University of Colorado, but that did not assuage my anxiety.  This poem was an explosion I had let out of myself.  I knew my mother was proud to have grandchildren, and I knew she loved these children.  But the way she seemed to be going about building her relationship with them had been cutting into me. The poem helped me find the reason why.

My mother and father had been grade school sweethearts and she wanted me to find a sweetheart while I was young and marry him, too.  At a  “cousins’ club” gathering when I was in Kindergarten, I played with a little boy.  All the way home in our black Chevrolet sedan, my mother told me how much that little boy liked me and how much fun having a boyfriend would be. At the drive-in theater near our home, pre-show time, I enjoyed the swings at the playground whenever my parents took my sister and me to the movies with them instead of paying for a babysitter.  My mother told me how very soon I wouldn’t want to be swinging by myself, but with a boyfriend pushing me.  That was what would really be fun. From an era when life for a woman started when she had a partner, my mother was only 24 when she began telling me these things. Maybe she hadn’t had enough dating time herself and was constantly thinking about it.  Maybe when she and my father made some money and, at last, weren’t struggling, she wanted to indulge her grandchildren.

When I began spending a lot of time with a good looking Catholic first-chair violinist in high school, my parents, who had never joined a synagogue, although observant Jewish immigrants raised them, joined a reformed Jewish Temple in a neighboring upper middle class town, hoping to promote my meeting an affluent good Jewish boy.  Dutifully, as a sophomore, I met a young man in my confirmation class.  When my mother called me my junior year in college to tell me she felt it was time to get engaged to him, I did.  The next year we married. I didn’t have to spend years upsetting her.

Now I had the two children she wished from me.  And I had them within the time frame she desired.  Despite wanting to shout, at least inside, “Stop!”, I had been holding onto the belief that if I kept fulfilling my mother’s wishes for my life, I would grow to realize that the life she imagined for me was a real life and one I wanted.  I would see that the life I was attracted to–understanding that what poetry and literature say matters–might simply be a troubling neurosis.  I was hopeful that the retorts I’d grown up with, “That’s only a story; in real life…,” would begin to sound right to me.  Being moved by literature, even writing it, was one thing, I’d say to myself. To live by it, well, I guessed that was quite another.

But I was learning that once I told a truth in poetry, I had to live from that truth. Writing poetry had been a detonator, and without anyone knowing, I was living in the blast zone.  Bulldozers had begun to push away the splintered emotional untruths I was trying to live by.  I wanted to occupy that leveled, but undeveloped land. Was that selfish? Maybe. But I just wanted to stand in the sunlight for awhile, dream about the arcs of yellow, the larger sky. My daughter was telling me something about choosing to fulfill my own destiny and facing that destiny with courage.

Still, un-matriculated, I studied with Nelson Bentley quarter after quarter in his famous evening workshop filled with enrolled students receiving credit and interlopers invited by him or other workshop members to bring their poems.  After the three times a week poetry readings he sponsored on the evenings our class didn’t meet, Nelson held court at tables in a local pastry shop.  I lived and talked and breathed poetry. One mid-semester, I took time from class to accompany my doctor husband to Sun Valley Idaho to a medical meeting while one of the children’s daycare teachers cared for them in our house. I was ready to spend some full days writing. I called my mother to say hello.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh, I’ve been spending my time writing poetry.”

“Well, as long as you’re keeping busy.  Remember, be a good doctor’s wife.”

I sat for a long while remembering my mother’s stories of the conventions she attended with my father who sold pharmaceuticals and rose through the corporate ranks to Vice President of sales.  I remembered the formal wear they enjoyed dressing up in, the way they loved the wining and dining, travel and events they were treated to. I remembered the picture of them with my mother in a Hawaiian muumuu and my father in a matching Hawaiian shirt, both with white leis around their necks.  I remembered the many, many pictures of the round dining tables at which they ate seven course meals with other attending couples. “Wives make a big difference in getting their spouses promotions,” my mother said.

It seemed never to be okay to define myself as something all my own. Everyday, I extracted laconic whispers of my subconscious, trying to make them louder. I listened and listened and listened to my own work and to the work of the others in my classes who were also doing this. I felt so alive, but after the phone call, I asked myself how what I was doing could possibly be important.  Who was I to know what feeling fully alive is all about?  Everyone else I grew up with seemed to feel that way reading Redbook and Cosmopolitan.  What was wrong with me? What does a good doctor’s wife do?  My husband was enjoying his seminars and I was trying to write. But now I carried around a flat feeling, my poetry-writing joy not comparing to my mother’s idea of what I should be finding invigorating.

This way of torturing myself settled in for a long visit.  Some afternoons, with my daughter in school and my husband at work, I rented a rowboat and my son and I rowed around Greenlake to a little island in the center. One afternoon, as we rocked on the tiniest of waves, my son told me from his narrow plank seat that he wished he had eyes in the back of his head.  He wanted to see what was behind him, like the chicken pock marks I’d told him were on his shoulders.  I wrote a poem for Nelson Bentley’s workshop, changing the name of the lake because I liked the meaning of the word “union” and Seattle had a Lake Union, too.

Rowing on Lake Union, Spring, 1978

On water each crust I feed the birds
falls apart like reason.
The duck’s wake resembles ours;
behind us the way grows wider.

My son says he wants to wear
his head on backwards for awhile
to see the last chicken pock fading
between his shoulders, the birthmarks
persistent in their shapes.  Secrets
gather in the hollow of his back
like legs budding on a tadpole.

Around the Echo Lake of my childhood
old men sat nodding and webbed
to their lawn chairs.  Fishing bottom
they hooked a whiskered excuse for dreams.
Then sleeping with eyes open
was compulsory like crouching
under chairs during air raid drills;
if I did not sleep I could not die.

Going forward we celebrate the clouds
billowing after their weight,
the sun’s sure fire against the blue.

As we row there is a squeak in the oarlock;
the boat fields our weight on water.
Death unsticks from my dreams now,
leaves with her slippers flapping.

When I was a girl my mother was in and out of hospitals for operations on hemorrhoids, bone spurs, and joint replacements. When she was going “in” she’d buy a new robe and slippers and when she came “out” she’d recuperate at home wearing them. My grandmother sobbed to me each time over the phone about her “Chanulah,” having health problems that continued a series of them from childhood when she’s had mastoid trouble. My father, working all day, and staying the evening with my mother, was pressured and preoccupied and unavailable to reassure us. During one of my mother’s hospital stays, I dreamt she died and returned to our kitchen as a ghost wearing one of the pairs of open-toed, open-back slippers she’d bought before entering the hospital.  In my dream, I could hear the flapping sound the stiff soles made against her heels. I wanted to do what I could to make sure she stayed alive. I took very seriously the idea that never making her worry or be unhappy would help.

But now I was an adult with children of my own.   I saw the life-line I wanted to cast to help them and me to stay fully alive and with poetry’s help, the images of yellow arcs and death leaving with those slippers flapping, I was taking a giant step.