Two more poems from The Storm, and then I'll
read some poems from Striking the Dark Air for Music.
This first poem is about my daughter Jennifer.
It's called "Jennifer by Moonlight."
And she was about a year and a half old, I think,
when I wrote this.
We were both sitting on a front porch on a pretty dark night
overcast.
And we're doing our different things which
consisted of her crawling around, looking for moths
on the porch and cramming them into her mouth
and me feeling very superior and sitting there
on this porch with a typewriter in front of me,
almost literally waiting for anything
to pass by so I could write about it,
and realizing after a while that she definitely
had the advantage.
"A cricket with a short circuit whirrs in grass behind a stone.
The dark electric sound seems to shine,
attracting our daughter with her mouth full of moth wings,
toward the porch edge where she teeters on her hands and knees,
inarticulate and stares.
When the second cricket sizzles like a star dunked in a dipper,
she giggles first, then jabbers at our moon
perched on our forward.
Carelessly it spills its light like milk across the yard.
Absorbed in what she cannot comprehend,
our speechless lady pouts, vexed by this brief innocence
of crickets singing and the moon."