Quiet Times

POETRY

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

I. Shadow Chasm

This one is my friend, said my two-and-a-half-year-old, or actually my thousand-day-old, if we’re counting.

She was pointing to the author photo on the back of Sylvia Plath’s yellow-jacketed collected poems.

Her is my friend, she said again.

I responded, Right, that’s great kiddo,

but she kept going, And her died. But her is still my friend.

II. Everything

Why you don’t know everything? she asked.

It came out more like “everysing,” because she hadn’t yet turned three. We were listening to a Lo-Fi song that had a refrain I’d transliterate as wop-wao, but which my daughter repeated as meow, which is way better. This quiet time, I was reading Tracy K. Smith, and she was poring over Junie B. Jones. Every minute or so, she’d ask, Why there is a monster? Why this guy mad?

I don’t know, sweetie, I kept saying. I don’t know.

I was buried in Smith’s poem about the death of her father, about how he’d been like a “lord,” but before he died -how long before?- her “view of him hardened,” and she shrunk him to “human size.” I was wondering whether it was better to be as a god, for a bit, and then be mortalized by your own child, or to be understood as fragile and flailing from the get-go.

I was thinking and thinking, wop-wao, which is to say, sinking and sinking, meow. Eventually, she got fed up, and said, Why you don’t know everything?

I laughed as the shadow chasm opened up again beneath me; welcome, welcome, welcome.