first person

First Person

a poem about mad chickens

narration

and finding your way around I

As he squirmed from my arms,

crawled out of reach,

and bolted to his bedroom, he announced:

Squirming!

Crawling!

Escaping!

Last week I held him on my lap

to keep him in the room.

Turning round and round in my arms, he said:

Power-struggling!

Power-struggling!

Power-struggling!

I can't tell if I am amused

or enraged.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

He knows

exactly

what he's doing.

This is his new conversational tic.

He's become the narrator

of maneuvers.

His narrator's voice is pinched and panting,

like he's battling something enormous,

slippery, and locked:

pinned under a whale

that's slipped from its hammock-on-a-winch, perhaps,

or sweating out the biggest poop of his life.

Fighting!

Pushing!

Writhing!

For awhile I smiled.

His diction was, after all,

both specific and accurate.

He said writhing,

and writhing he was.

Nice vocab, little man!

Nice emotional fluency!

I said "I'm proud of you,"

to us both.

All those parenting books

with detailed instructions

of how to become the person I must urgently become,

they must have done some trick.

We're here.

The boy knows every word for squirm.

It was a hard morning.

Something was wrong and

I didn't know what question to ask.

(Figuring out what question to ask

is 50% of love. The other 50%

is waiting quietly to hear the answer.)

I waited for him to answer

the question I hadn't asked yet -

Are you okay?

Do you have a poopy butt?

Did you wake up too early?

Are you an ass hole now, or what?

He kicked his brother in the throat

and bolted.

He knows that's not okay.

I caught him by the arm

and pulled him into my lap

and held him.

Pushing

Kicking

Fighting

Escaping

Squirming

Rolling

Diving

Hitting

Struggling

His eyelids clenched.

His fists shot.

His back arched, coiled, curved.

Struggling

Struggling

Struggling

Isn't it amazing

how many words he knows

for help

and how look it took me

waiting quietly

to hear the answer to the question I hadn't asked.

I imagine him in the dark

heart thundering as he calls out

"Mommy! I'm in the dark!"

I imagine my voice returning,

reedy through the dripping air,

"you're right! It is dark!"

Mommy, I don't care about right;

I want to be out of the dark,

back in the light.

I'd been thinking in first-person.

narrating his maneuvers

starting first, always, with me, my, I.

I'm the parent, the interpreter,

the reader of all the books.

"My son has a great vocabulary."

"I've been working hard

to support his emotional fluency."

"I hear your words, baby. I see your body."

But look at me,

Mommy.

Hear me.

Flailing

Squirming

Escaping

Running away

Fighting

Kicking

Help me

A train leaves Pittsburgh

traveling west at breakneck speed.

Oh God, oh God, we're going too fast!

The compass,

its arrow specific and accurate,

will point steadfastly west

all the way to the scene of the crash.

The compass,

its arrow precocious and bright,

cannot ease off the gas.

I sat in the big chair

with his desperate limbs thrashing

and said

Holding

Breathing

Calming

He slapped my arm

and kicked my chest

and panted

Kicking

Hitting

Scraping

I put my hand on his back

as hot and damp as a fresh loaf of bread wrapped up too soon

and said

Stroking

Helping

Loving

He slipped his arms around my neck,

his legs around my waist.

He pressed his face into my shoulder.

He bonded to my body

tight as a barnacle, suddenly stock still

in the whipping tides.

I waited, quietly.

He said

Loving, 

too.

loving

more