Clint Smith and a Dance of Crows

A day of many “small contrivances,” a concept I learned from Sylvia Townsend-Warner. I put on the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge singing The Messiah while I organized and cleaned kitchen cabinets, dealt with medical bills, did laundry, talked with medical insurance people (four times, no one is surprised to hear that everyone in this country is furious with insurance executives). After lunch I finished a couple of books I need to return to the library.

One of them is Above Ground, by Clint Smith, a book of poems about becoming and being a father of two, despite doctors having said he and his wife would not be able to have children. The poems include some that make me laugh. There’s an “Ode to the Electric Baby Swing,” that ends, 

…I am saying you
give me something she doesn’t, and don’t
get me wrong I love the mother of my son
it’s just that you make me feel young again.

There are some that make me dazzled and grateful, like the one called “What I’ve Learned” that ends, 

There are sixty-thousand miles of blood vessels in my body
and every single centimeter keeps me alive.

But mostly there are poems about children, about loving and caring for children, about how fiercely we want a world worthy of them. One ends, 

He dreams of being an astronaut (and a teacher and chef
and a superhero and a Pokémon) and I dream
of his dreams and how possible I want them all to be.

The poet never mentions that he is Black in a white supremacist world, but occasionally, as in that last line about dreams, we are reminded of fear, injustice, unequal application of the law. Mostly though, we remember with renewed love and recognition the children we have loved more than we love our own lives.

Clint Smith and I, we have in common, in addition to children, New Orleans: that place of legend, heat, masks, beads, jambalaya, jazz, and heartbreak. He writes about that too.

Night starts to fall at 3:30 pm and the crows begin dancing their way south, time to make the bed with the clean sheets.