On Poetry: Pausing for Mother's Day

BY FLEDA BROWN
Special to the Record-Eagle

May 12, 2008 04:00 am

—

My dear friend Jeanne Walker asked me to take over her poetry workshop at the University of Delaware while she gave birth to Jack, the late-life infant recalled in the poem I've selected below. We were both slogging away at getting published, getting promoted, teaching our classes, and at the same time being the best mothers we could. I remember Jeanne saying that one reason for writing poems instead of fiction is that it's easier to work on a poem in the small spaces between the dailiness of changing diapers, tying shoes and folding clothes. Jack, by the way, has just gotten married -- that's how long ago that workshop was.

A poem invites an intimacy of the daily sort. I think this is because a good poem, like a good mother, speaks quietly into the ear. It doesn't declaim. It doesn't announce or preach. It acknowledges the gaps, the unspoken truths that rest quietly, as if between the lines. Intimacy requires a degree of silence, a listening. The line-breaks in a poem stop us, briefly, to listen. Notice the first line of "Nursing," that ends "you hold so still." We can feel ourselves holding still for a second before we go on to the next line.

The poet Denise Levertov has suggested that a line-break should amount to about "half a comma" in our reading. A pause that's enough, at least, to hear the line itself, briefly, separately. To listen to its own particular music and its own particular sense.

I'm pausing on this Mother's Day to recall Jeanne's and my children when they were young, and our grandchildren, our as-yet-unborn great-grandchildren, and on and on, into the silence at the end of the poem.

Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. Learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com

Nursing

Waiting for the milk to come, you hold so still
that I imagine you years from now, maybe
when I am dead and you are an old man
anchored in some boat on Lake Miltona
deep in reeds, late in Fall, the water
so cold it hardly remembers its own name,
you think the shapes of fish, calling them
from sleep: sunfish, walleye pike, muskie,
the way my father called the stars at night
leaning in his jacket on the railing
till out of darkness fire spun to us
while we held still: Big Dipper, Little Dipper,
Orion, and the tall North Star. He didnt
reel them hand over hand. He only thought
their names into the unimaginable darkness
the way I like still here beside you and
your children come, calling their own children
from the place further and further away
where everything is stunned by grace to silence.
And then, all of a sudden, the milk comes.

-- Jeanne Murray Walker, from --Coming Into History,--Cleveland State University Press, 1990