October 10: Son, New Poem, Daughter's Costumes

I don't have much time to post tonight.  You see, my three-year-old son is with me.  I wasn't counting on that.  My wife was supposed to be watching him, but she's at church.  He was supposed to be with her, but he wasn't really cooperating with the church ladies.  Therefore, I'm at my desk, trying to keep an eye on him and post something witty.  It's not working too well for me.  In fact, he almost pulled an entire file down on himself just now.  Seriously.

I have a new poem for you.  The poem is really the only reason I wanted to do this post tonight.  It's the first poem I've written in a while that I haven't struggled with.  It was inspired by the fact that my daughter has decided to change her Halloween costume about ten times in the last three days.  And it's inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Halloween.  Mythology.  My daughter.  Those are the ingredients.

Okay, Saint Marty has to go stop his son from setting the office on fire.

Metamorphoses

I want to speak about bodies

Changed into new forms. 

My daughter, ten, on the verge

Of petal, stigma, ovule, sepal,

Talks of All Hallows Eve, the form

She will assume when Selene

Rises into the starry heavens.

Talks of the living dead, hunger

For the taste of flesh, of body.

Then changes her mind.

She will be straw in cornfield,

Blight against crow feather.

Then she chooses

A fairy nymph of cobweb,

Draped in lace and silk,

Arachne’s fine handiwork,

Fat with flies and moth wing.

Her muse shifts yet again.

She will be spell caster.

Pointed hat, frog skin,

Green and marbled with the dark

Matter of the universe.  And now,

Her final mutation, she will be

A girl, red-cloaked, a penchant

For forest and hairy stranger

In her young breast.  I fear

This form most.  Fear she won’t

Want to morph back on All Soul’s Day.

Fear she will just keep changing

States.  Liquid.  Solid.  Vapor.

Until she drifts away from me,

Or becomes some creature I don’t know

How to love.

1 From A. S. Kline’s translation of Book One of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

This just might be my daughter on Halloween