LOVE LETTER #3—DEAR DAUGHTER
In the beginning I look out the window and remember when you were not quite three,
dressed in the pink satin bunny costume I hand-stitched for Halloween.
Zipper is broken and the ecru embroidered camisa I asked you to wear underneath to
keep warm is bunched up where the belly of the rabbit would be.
Florets of the Mother’s Day rhododendron pool on the ground, rouge red petals against
dark earth.
I watch you tamp the cotton undershirt back within the costume as though to tuck
yourself, the girl, back inside, pushing against boundaries of reality and play.
Should I say the young child is beguiling, so that later we will retrieve the memory?
How else to reflect on today’s interlude when your boys open boxes of costumes your
friend’s twins outgrew during the pandemic?
If I were Mary Cassatt painting pastorals of children and their mothers in France, you
might critique my art as the effort to think by feeling,
billions of neurotransmitters leaping synaptic gaps to bridge emotion to memory.
Here I might write about gestures of the body exposed to first light, perceptions of what
our skin feels, basking translucent in rays of spring.
Or how the body yearns for both familiar comforts and novelty, not unlike the impulse to
run naked in the rain on a stage of bewilderment,
where borders between the real and play tilt, exchange places, push back, rebelling,
and may explain how some children become Puck, the garden Elizabethan.
I did not peer through a camera, there was no time. In a flash, boys running, costumes
in hand, to stand on wooden chairs warmed by the sun, and lickety-split, shed socks and
shoes, jeans, t-shirts. I should call to my daughter, I say to myself, tell you to watch with
me, ask what you think, Is this okay?—but why?
Children unaware of my gaze as one whispers his reasons to be pirate; the other Ninja. I
should go find the camera, but if I move, I will realign the air,
and the space between here and where they now stand will collapse, as when the bird I
observe senses I am about to turn the page.
Denise Calvetti Michaels teaches Psychology at Cascadia College in Bothell, WA. She earned an MA in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College and an MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics from University of Washington, Bothell. Denise’s poetry is forthcoming in 2024 Paterson Literary Review. Her new book, North Creek, scheduled for publication in early spring by Cave Moon Press, compiles her previously published poetry along with published poems by local poets Joan McBride and Sue Selmer.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 