So I have a three-year-old daughter or nearly
three-year-old daughter.
And my best friend who happens to be
a poet who shall remain nameless begged me not to write
any poems about kids forever.
OK.
Which he usually finds exceedingly sentimental.
So of course, I disobeyed him immediately.
But this is actually not a poem about kids.
It's really a poem about the inside of my head.
Which considering the amount of time
I was spending on the playground, was deeply confused.
It's called "Bewitched Playground."
The poem mentions the Japanese haiku master Bashō.
And there are two lines in the poem that
are actually lines from his journal
about the death of his mother.
Bewitched Playground.
Each could picture probably with great care
his brother drawing the corded string of a cherry silk bag
and mumbling to Bashō above the keepsake.
Pay your respects to mother's white hair.
Now your eyebrows look a little white too.
But all have turned instead to watch this child, a girl,
my daughter, an astute migrant skimming the stream of days,
toted wherever she wants to eat the dirt of inattentive towns,
to arm wrestle as with the blind, and steal a stoic,
shipping him home.
All have turned and run to her because she
has a spider on her neck.
She has seen herself though blindfolded by a cloud.
The sun is a yellow jacket drowning in a cup of coffee.
She carries a spider in her hair, blonde and blonder,
dear river.
I explained in the class today that there was also
a line in that poem that makes reference
to a song by the children's singer Raffi,
which I was hearing over and over again.
It's the thing about the spider.
That he kind of goes there's a spider in her hair
there in your hair.
There's a spider in her hair in her hair.
There's a spider in her hair.
So on.