Alyse Knorr: I’m Alyse Knorr, and this is PoetryNow. Having a baby is just as huge a life change as everyone says it is. There’s been no surprises there. It’s just turned everything upside down in all of the best possible ways. From day one, she already had this personality. You know, we had this idea that we bought this house, and we had this baby, we should have a yard. This is what people do with kids in the suburbs. They have yards to kick the soccer ball around in. My wife and I both grew up in the South. She grew up in Virginia, I grew up in Georgia. You can grow anything in Georgia and Virginia. The water’s just in the air. But no one’s a good gardener in Denver, because you’re living in the desert. So we have a very unrealistic expectation for our yard, which is complicated by the fact that our neighbors on both sides of us have perfect, lush gardens of Eden. And so, I had a baby, I bought a new house, I’m trying to grow grass in my yard, and I can’t stop thinking about the yard and the baby and death. Those three subjects are just bouncing around in my brain, and they feel connected.

This poem begins with an epigraph by Zhai Yongming: “All who have stood in a mother’s hand are sure to die because they were born.”

(READS POEM)

Quiescence
 
Between us bobs the baby, solemn in her infant wet suit.
The pool is the only place where
              screaming does not indicate terror.
 
The neighbor’s pansy beds—O to lie down in those beds
and doze. Greener than grass, says Sappho,
              originator of envy.
 
My sleep is pollinated by the baby’s wails: dreams
sprouting voices in peril. Mind sped up and emaciated
              like a greyhound
 
in the track. The end of growth is death.
The painting begins with a scribble. Or is a scribble
              the finishing touch?
 
Call your plants by their names, 10,000 words a day.
We feed, we weed, we read her books about owls.
              What am I minding
 
but stillness? What have I grown except loss?

* * *

It’s overwhelming, the amount of advice that you get about both gardening and parenting. I knew there would be a ton of advice in having kids. But I didn’t know that it would all conflict, and that it would all be so specific. You’re supposed to say 10,000 words a day to your baby, or you know, she won’t ever develop language. What am I supposed to do, count 10,000 words to make sure that I’ve hit the quota? Mostly I’m reading her books about sentient owls.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Call your plants by their names, 10,000 words a day. / We feed, we weed, we read her books about owls. /              What am I minding // but stillness? What have I grown except loss?

You’re always hearing about how mothers are creators of life, but since all life dies, that means that mothers are also, by definition, creators of death. I sometimes think about how, by creating her, I’ve burdened my daughter with death, with her own future death. I don’t really worry day to day about my daughter dying or, you know, if she sneezes, I’m not like, “Oh, she has the flu, she’s gonna die.” Especially because, day to day, Lucy’s just so fun. She’s happy, she plays. It’s more of an existential, just kind of intellectual experience, I guess. I don’t think that it’s necessarily bad or necessarily scary or awful. It just is. It’s just a fact that mother’s are makers of death.

Katie Klocksin: That was Alyse Knorr and her poem “Quiescence.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.