
When Listening Began
Do I write because
I listen?
Or do I listen because I write?
I recall being carried in a blanket
and listening to crunching snow as I peered
at my bobbing wool-edged view,
tilting my head to see past a wavering corner of wool,
a piece of shadowed fabric I knew well in all its
wind-breaking, sleep-inducing glory.
It winked the building across the street from ours
in and out of sight, and cropped it into an insistent picture —
a pale turret of smooth gray bricks
warmed beige in the sunlight,
with dark-rimmed windows shining
under a pointed cap of shingles in the same dark hue.
The sight made me long for language
because I knew it needed to be expressed.
This picture on that cold day, needed to be told.
Wool flipped down and covered my face,
by my mother’s hand, I knew,
and balmy sleep crept close,
but the scene has remained in mind and I’ve learned
how to tell it, and found,
as I searched for combinations of words,
that words are indeed as important to me
as the idea of them felt
in the baby’s mind.
Today I am heartstruck
by words opposite first-cherished memories,
repugnant words tossed grenadelike,
meant to deflect reason
and foster the same disdain for learning
our parents warned us against
when we were old enough to listen.
Though I could have imagined this consuming chill
while composing a frightening tale,
the real life arctic shock of it, stabs.
I turn back to that pure moment of my past.
Mother kept me warm as she held me
on the earliest day I remember.
Warmth felt right, but the freezing air
was a fine thing too, another sort of frame
that focused the picture I haven’t lost,
the welcome side of cold — the chilled wisp upon my cheek that signals to me still:
Listen.
I write because I listen.
The listening steers me,
and I write.

