An excerpt from
Hide & Seek
by Susan Glickman
Poems No One Writes
For Jesse at two
Who is he, this diminutive male person
vrooooming around the living room? One minute he is
all self-possession: "I'm BIG;
I can use the lawnmower." The next,
he whimpers at my knee "Cuddle me, cuddle me,
Mama."
Why does he love trucks & baseball? Why
kick his vanilla-scented baby doll
with the realistically opening-and-shutting blue eyes
across the room and down the stairs?
Who taught him to be a cartoon boy?
The mothers in the park confer. Hormones
are a topic of endless diversion here. We know
exactly how irresistible they are, having been
beaten to our knees bearing these same cherubs who now
dig & swing & slide together
in their brief commonwealth.
Other people's children also smell sweet
around the neck and shoulders. It's June
and sunscreen masks them a little, and the odours of hot cotton,
sand, and apple juice, but they're still unmistakably
small mammals, and ours.
Poems no one writes occupy our days. We hitchhike
their imaginations; it takes all morning to walk one block
there being so many creatures and crevices and bicycles
and mailboxes to examine along the way.
Love is in the details, someone said. I don't know who-that's the kind of thing
I don't know anymore. But it's true.
The infant whose suckling once healed my womb
now cries out in his sleep when I dream he has fallen;
looks up from play to tell me what I am thinking.
And when I ask if he saw a picture in my head,
he says "Yes" quite simply
and returns to his game.
* Line 4: read as "yawnmower"