Comes a time when you have to wait outside the men’s bathroom door...

...and trust your son to dirty urinals and the company of men you don’t know. Or stand in line for the women’s bathroom during intermission (Beauty and the Beast) with eight little girls dressed like Belle in gold and white gowns, two stalls out of commission (one doorless, one with a clogged toilet). Against the backdrop of the reality of at least one child found in a suitcase at the bottom of a pond and news of a roadside stalker (Sonoma County), how do you launch a child, trust your community, believe in God?

I’m so thirsty my armpits hurt, said my son last night when he snuck down the stairs after 10 p.m., found me scribbling. When he asks what I’m writing about, I can’t say about rape, so I defer to the page before and say: how a human ear has as sure of a curve as an abalone shell, and both rims seem to curl out of the same horn, only one is silver and one is of skin beneath which lies a brain (proof enough of God).

I don’t tell him that it doesn’t matter what image I start with, I end up asking the same questions (end of paragraph 1) which is my lot as mother/writer. No surprise most of us hunker down, like those abalone, and suction tight to the home cliff at the slightest touch of a stranger. Or have the urge to nod in affirmation at the opening lines of the poem Not a Sparrow: “Just when I think the Buddhists/are wrong and life is not mostly suffering,/I find a dead finch near the feeder” Tess Gallagher, Dear Ghosts, p.5). Best I can hope for is to be coaxed out of mistrust for the group at large when one or two members of the human tribe make devastating choices.

And take notes as I go. Like Lucia Perillo in her book: I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature. Touted on its cover flap as “a poet’s honest—and edgy—reckoning of her attempt to maneuver through the world in a body she reluctantly inhabits,” Perillo’s book includes, in addition to ways of grappling with multiple sclerosis, enlightening scrutiny of the tradition of female outlaw poets in the chapter, Bonnie Without Clyde.

As Perillo questions the Norton Anthology’s table of contents with regards to female poets, she writes: “Now in this moment: I pull poetry books down from my shelves until I assemble a big stack written by my more-or-less peers. Together we write this poem I call ‘Bonnie Without Clyde’ (p. 126)” composed of lines by twelve women writers from Kim Addonizio to Susan Yuzna. What a cool way to put one’s finger on the pulse of female poetry.

I admire also the stark, sure overview Perillo allows herself: “Though it was the male poets of the last midcentury who first started writing autobiographically, it was the women who got slapped with the confessional label, which has come to mean a large degree of self-absorption combined with poorly edited melodrama. If one were to get paranoid about this, it might seem that the term confessional poetry was coined so that any eruptions coming from female quarters could be squelched (p. 123).” Such overviews serve to remind one simply to keep writing.

No excuse to hide, or your daughter will, is a line I cut (for its baldness) and then keep splicing back in to a Joan of Arc poem I muscle to the ground preparing today to submit to CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. As a poet I’m cursed with that childlike belief in the incantatory strength of words to push sunward the group mind we inhabit. More likely blessed.

One day in the park (while I was home writing), my 6 year old son ran off alone to use the bathroom. My father called after him to wait.

“What,” yelled my little guy, “are you scared someone’s going to steal me?!”

“Actually, yes,” my father calmly replied when he caught up with my son, “I need to go with you for now.”

My father reassured me he didn’t provide further gory details or launch into any lengthy explanations. We both agreed it was a necessary statement of fact that my child is better armed with than not. And my son’s exasperation when he finds me planted outside the door waiting for him--worth withstanding. Soon enough he’ll be on his own.

When Elizabeth invites me to a poetry reading, I say to myself: I can handle this.

I, mother of three, can escape for a night. But I get a headache just trying to remember the last reading I attended...ten years ago, was it?! I think so...Tess Gallagher, talking about her life with Raymond Carver. I wondered what Gallagher meant when she mentioned the obligations of running a household (I was teaching a couple classes--using Carver’s Where I’m Calling From--pregnant with my first child, clueless). I remember thinking, Gallagher keeps house? Writers keep house? I clung instead to her next image: Gallagher and Ray looking over one another’s work (guests gone, dishes done) like a pair of horses, one black, one white, pulling the chariot of poetry behind them.

Everything’s lined up: the husband agrees to watch the kids, Liz will drive. I don’t even know who we’ll hear at the bookstore, but I’m busting out. Glitch one: my husband’s cross-country team needs a chaperone for the weekend. Liz’s husband graciously offers to entertain, in addition to their son, my three children; embarrassed by the last-minute ditch, I agree. My two-year old clambers up beside Liz’s husband, and says, Go away Mom, bye. Liz and I don our coats and head for the door. Until (glitch two) my middle child (the five-year-old) falls to the ground, wraps his arms around my ankles, and cries on my shoelaces.

Sure, bring him-- Liz says kindly, she in her lovely black pants, top, scarf. I disengage my son from my snot-damp sweats, zip up the old blue overcoat and take his hand. We’re late; when we walk in a poet’s wrapping up a stanza. We grab a couple seats on the fringe; my son plunks down on the floor. We make it through the next speaker’s comments about the book he’s compiled on Philip Whalen. Then my son (on his stomach) creeps towards the bookshelves on the far wall. The weight-loss section keeps him a few seconds: on one cover, a woman in tight scarlet pants holds a platter of fruit. A few headshots of perky brunettes, blondes, tilted and smiling. My son stealth-crawls, fist over fist, to Relationships: beaming couples that beat the odds and stayed together. I’m wondering where photos of all the couples that didn’t make it end up. My friend’s listening, probably actually absorbing the poetry. When my son starts drumming on the shelves, I scoop him up and step outside.

I’m sorry, I say to Liz when we reappear (my son and I having downed ice-cream cones around the corner and yet another poet at the mic), I have to go. I’m worried about the two-year-old (who informs me indignantly when we get to the house that he’d like to stay longer). It’s not that I can’t stomach poetry anymore--though, on occasion, I too, dislike it (as Marianne Moore opens with in her crucial poem Poetry)—but after eight years of either being pregnant or nursing a baby I’m used to sleeping by 9. I’m grateful we escaped, edging back to the public world of poetry, and for those rare minutes I got to spend alone with my son over scoops of mint-chip ice-cream. I’m just a bad date these days, I remark on the way out of Liz’s house. Don’t mention it, she says, and shortly scores us a pair of tickets to hear Mary Oliver, balcony seats, the parking lot and entire theater--we note with glee--full of people who came out just for the love of poetry.

(See also: A Dangerous Mission: Tess Gallagher by Gary Lehman on Gallagher’s trajectory as a writer and which portion of her writing defines her in the public eye at: http://jmww.150m.com/Gallagher.html )

(For complete text of Moore’s poem: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1169.html)