Entry 1109 — Still Trying to Get People To Appreciate My Urine
The other day I was thinking about early childhood, how it is for most of us idyllic before we’re sent off to school. What particularly grabbed me was the simple fact that when you’re very young, everything is new. And important! And magical! Imagine a world in which one can enter a dark room, push a switch, and fill the room with light! What could possibly be more magical than that? For a while, I think my ability to fill a bottle with this beautiful yellow liquid that came so easily out of the thing hanging between my legs was a miracle–one, furthermore, that only I was capable of. I kept a jar of the liquid which I showed my sister and a friend of hers–because I thought they’d appreciate it. But my mother noticed. No mother around now to do the same for the following two poems, both of which are miracles:
I’m sure they’ve been on exhibit here before, but the second has been spruced up. Each represents, it seems to me, all I’ve learned over the years as a poet. Keats is a source for both, but especially the first. Does anyone read him anymore? The Grimms’ Fairy Tales my mother read to me and my sister are another. Poetry, I suspect, has been my way of trying to return not to the Faereality of my childhood but to the wonderful paths I was sure would lead into it. One of them (the most important?) pre-sleep bedtime when I got to within a tenth-of-a-poem of daydreaming all the way into the wonderful secret world story characters lived in, comic book characters soon prominent among them.
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