After completing The Weight of Air, my travel memoir, (available by donation) another project has taken hold: an autobiography written in prose-poem form. Epic in length, it has already grown beyond 6,000 words and is not yet halfway finished. Most poems average fewer than 300 words, so this one stretches the form considerably.
The work begins with my father and mother—their early lives and eventual meeting in Chicago. Then come my own beginnings: the arrival of my four siblings, the rhythms of our household, my father’s work in social justice, the moves, the schools, the growing up—alongside my mother’s struggles and her efforts to find balance. Graduation follows, then leaving home, mental struggles, and the uncertain steps into adult life.
The writing has now reached the time when my first daughter, Naomi, was born. Soon afterward her mother and I divorced, and her mother had to be institutionalized. The story carries both tenderness and upheaval.
Here is a small section from that writing.
The Child
Strong vowels formed her name:
Naomi.
For a season
three shared one bed.
Her mother’s breast was never far.
Light gathered in her—
blonde hair,
green eyes.
No sooner had she found her steps
than the hand began to draw.
In her father's studio
page after page
flew from her grasp.
At first
only bright scribbles—
then houses, figures,
the sun and rainbows.
A small school stood nearby.
She entered the circle of others.
A few years passed quietly
before the first fracture.
Something within her mother
turned against itself.
Hunger answered,
then denied.
Food taken in,
then cast away.
Voices rose at night.
Rooms held what could not settle.
Then the word was spoken:
Divorce.
It did not rest easily in him.
Yet it was received
as a narrowing path
that might still lead forward.