Day 3: That’s not really happening is it?

Today, I was thinking a lot about what it means to write now, versus what it meant to me when I was an undergrad or even a graduate student.  How motherhood especially broke me and changed me in a way that made me write differently.

The Light in Trees

When it wasn’t really happening, I’d
exit the parkway, unknowingly drive
past my favorite college bar where I’d
ordered beers for their sound: Black Mambo or
Lambic . Sang full lung to Cab Calloway.
It was there (half-drunk) I’d found the perfect
light caught in a winter bare tree. That golden
blur that slurred on the page toward a poem. 

When he was born, sleep became like light
though passing trees. Burried juiceboxes,
goldfish crackers, the sound track of High School
Musical blaring through my minivan
until silence was exotic, something
to be saved up for, and usually lost. 

Had I passed myself – the young drunk gazing
at the bare tree, the young mother reaching
to pass a juicebox to the screaming child –
I’d not seen anything.  The light, the tree
or even the god-damned poem.