As My Child Climbs the Apple Tree,
I Think of the Ancient Sephardic Poet Jehudah Halevi |
by Phil Terman
And the child climbs the apple tree, limb
by hesitant limb, my hands cupping the air
just beneath her torso. Already a tooth
is on the loose, her tongue working it back
and forth, her fingers prodding, anticipating
its absence. She branches up and crouches
in her nest of limbs, an exotic bird, surveys
the yard from her new advantage: a fawn
slowly crossing the road, delicate steps
naïve to our enormous machinery. Confused
season – bees sizzling in their coupled bodies,
the wind tearing at the willow, robins returned
and disoriented, my daughter’s restlessness,
and my own: Settle down. Enough
of this unpredictability. Kill us, or change us
forever. But the swallows roosting under our roof,
swooping in and out, their nests small apartments
tucked inside our openings, our rooms filled with
their sexual song. We live in a complicated
harmony, like those male and female orioles
pecking their hours at the image of their tree
in our living room window instead of weaving
hay into a crown, readying eggs for their legacies.
I watch and record spring’s convocation until
hunger stirs my loved ones, their blood spinning
their bodies into this waking world. Now
my wife’s hoe clicks clicks clicks not unlike
the tap tapping of the woodpecker in the upper
echelons. And the ancient poet said: Remember
the days of longing. This spring, I think, is preamble:
I have sought thy nearness, the poet claimed,
that name whose dwelling is infinite space, like
that field where the fawn thinks she’s alone.
She doesn’t hear us noticing her privacy, now
staring into the rustlings, now lifting her nose
into the almost-rain. And the poet concludes:
Seek the too-wonderful, the deeply-hid. And
my daughter, still perched in her apple tree,
observes bits of a robin’s cracked eggshell
scattered in the shadows beneath her. She wants
to try to fit the pieces together and return it
to its nest. She squiqqles down, reaches two arms
toward me –an embrace, a hoisting up and
a twirling behind my back, the gradual easing
of her hips onto my shoulders, her hands patting
my head in the thrill of her ascendancy, this
small body I balance, this little life I lift aloft. |
|
