Childcare

Rob Schlegel is a maestro of the not-so-simple title. His fourth book is Childcare; its second poem is “Poetry.” But it’s easy to imagine those two titles swapped. Childcare is all about poetry—what it can or can’t do for one patient, spacy, winningly unjaded parent. And “Poetry” is about childcare, and about a child who couldn’t care less:

POETRY
 
Is pointless, my son says. If you write that down
I’ll kill you.

In one moment, parenting can be a rude awakening; in the next, it’s the jaws of life, prying the heart open:

The baby shits the bed again. Little herring,
Let’s bathe, you and me.

And at its fullest, it can render poetry, or any commentary, superfluous:

After cleaning the sheets
Me and the baby are naked on the bed.
What poet hasn’t wished at least once in their life
That poetry were dead?

Parenthood is Childcare’s great subject, exerting a gravitational tug on every other subject, drawing Schlegel’s waking and dreaming hours into its orbit. Poetry happens, when it happens, thanks to serendipitous finds—“In the cafe, the barista says Satan’s Bomb / With almond milk for Sydney”—or within daily rhythms: “I tuck my son into bed. / I wish I had better parents, he says.” (Childcare alludes to William James and Clarice Lispector, but no aphorist sharper than that son.)

Schlegel meets time’s pressures with a clean, stenographic style; his gemlike emblems and diaristic sequences jot down observations but refrain from judgment, ponder but refuse definitive answers: “Kisha thaws chicken on the counter. / Is it dangerous to defrost / Feelings at room temperature?” There’s no room, in life or poetry, for exhaustiveness: “I have no place to put everything / My children make me feel.” What we’re allotted instead is, in a recurring Schlegelian word, a “sentence”—a linear course, steered by syntax while open to illogic, unpredictable until the very last word:

What if
Everything we say
Is one long sentence that only ends
When we end?
 
Fine, my daughter says, but what do you mean
End?