So I'll read First Of All, which Laura revised.
I'm so sorry.
No.
I actually love that.
Like go for it.
Go for it.
This is-- so someone in a class I visited today
asked like you write so much poetry, are you always writing?
And I thought, do I?
I didn't really think I wrote that often.
It doesn't feel like I write that often, but I suppose I do.
But I spent one year not writing at all,
and it was the year after my daughter was born.
And I just-- between having a newborn
and being a parent, that existential shift,
I did not know what to do with it.
And this is the first poem that happened after that year.
First of all, I'm your guide here.
In the evening dark morning streets, I point and name.
Look, the sycamores-- their mottled paint by number bark.
Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges.
I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest.
Stars smolder well into daylight.
Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs
paddling after their prized sticks.
Fall is when the only things you know, because I've named them,
begin to end.
Soon I'll have another season to offer you,
frost soft on the window and a porthole
sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches.
The first time you see something die,
you won't know it might come back.
I'm desperate for you to love the world because I brought you
here.