Devon Miller-Duggan: “After 25 years of teaching everything from a class on Fisher King mythology to comparative lit. surveys, I am finally (having at last gotten a book out) teaching creative writing, and for all the debates about whether it’s good for writers to teach writing and whether it can be taught at all, I just plain love it. That being said, my most recent ‘accomplishment’ is probably having gotten up in time to start the monastic day at 4:00 a.m. at Christ in the Desert, and having done the whole cycle, including singing antiphonally in Latin and weeding the hops field—all of which only added a layer of certainty to my conviction that I am about as unfit for a monastic life as it’s possible to be.”
“Oliver Leamy (10 Months Old) Spending …” by Devon Miller-DugganPosted by Rattle
Devon Miller-Duggan
OLIVER LEAMY (10 MONTHS OLD) SPENDING THE MORNING
WAVING A RED SOCK
Come on, try saying it without crooning—
Baaay-beee—
He’s certainly a baby—a splendid example of his genre—
Downy-blond, fuzzy-clad, toothless, and balloon-animal-limbed.
The truth is I’ve been dying to write, to find enough words
to wrap around how swamped I am by him,
how my real heart, which I’d have sworn was wide open waiting,
got shoved more open than should be possible
by the first sight of his big, translucent, luminous head
in the crook of his father’s arm.
Already we talk about “He used to (love to sleep with
his face turned into the crook of someone’s arm, breathing
his own small breaths; not take his hats off).”
Today he spent the morning waving the red sock he’d taken off
(he used to leave them on, too) his pudgy foot.
Over and over, off and on, for hours.
And I thought of Englishwomen wearing red ribbons around their necks
to mock guillotined French aristocrats,
red scarves worn by men (like Hemingway) running the bulls in Pamplona,
the red come-and-get-it petticoats of dancers at the Moulin Rouge,
Williams’s red wheelbarrow.
He smiled as he waved the sock, grinned so hard
his head dropped back as if to make room for such a smile.
Surely he wanted to understand something about the sock,
or waving the sock, or waving something red.