Seamus Heaney and Martin Sheen

The weather is turning.  Humidity gusting away and coolness coming off the trees, the river, the soft faces of passers-by.  You had a good sleep last night.  At 2:00 and 5:30 you woke, acne invisible in the lamp light, just your lemur eyes turning on and off over the curve of my breast.

Yesterday was the St. Olaf faculty meeting and my first work-like day away from you.  Your father and I sat at a table with freshly-dressed faculty members and ate mini-quiche and almond braids and cantaloupe and talked delicately about race and identity and constructing an inclusive classroom.  I wore a new shirt Gak bought for me from anthropologie; billowy enough to cover my still-swollen belly and broad enough at the chest to cover my still-voluminous decolletage.

Seamus Heaney died today.  Irish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.  A man who could carve a poem around nature or war or love or family or work and who (by all accounts) was actually a kind human being.

Your sister spent the morning at the state fair with Gak and Ampa and Karu.  I imagine her attention and desire captured by puffs of cotton candy and stuffed panda bears and mechanical horses lifting themselves into perfunctory circles.  I imagine the whining and the wet heat pressing her bangs to her forehead.  The smell of the sheep barn.  The search for a patch of curb without cigarette butts or sno-cone residue to sit upon while eating a warm bucket of quarter-sized chocolate chip cookies.  When he was little, my brother Michael wanted to sit on each and every tractor or farming implement.  When I was little (and later, when I was bigger), I wanted to play game after game on the Midway.  Wiffle balls into goblets, water guns wishing horses down a track, rings around the throats of milk bottles.

Meanwhile, your father and I sat at lunchtime and watched "The West Wing" while you nursed.  Then I wrapped you in a sage green swaddle and set you swinging and came here, to the cafe, to drink a latte and eat a peanut butter filled chocolate.

In less than a week I will walk back into a classroom where I am supposed to help students learn how to write poems.  Theoretically, good poems.  The irony being that you have to write a lot of bad poems before you can write a good poem.  A lot of bad poems.  And then after you write a good poem you still have to write more bad poems.  Failed poems.  Awkward, incompetent poems.  Poems that know too much about themselves and poems with cliches as familiar as glass.  Out of all of this--the river and baby acne and mini-quiche and stuffed pandas and Seamus Heaney and Martin Sheen and ideas about race in the classroom--you have to choose something to write a poem about.  You have to feel some kind of urgency about a fragment of the world and you have to write it down.

One of my teachers at some point explained (perhaps quoting someone else) that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again with the expectation that at some point you will get a different result.  This is also the definition of prayer and poetry and hope.  And sometimes we are called to make a space where this behavior is not seen as unreasonable, but rather as the most important work we do.