TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

The experience of aging, of having a birthday, is so exciting for children. I remember when my kids reached double digits; that was a big deal! This year is the first year I have not one, but two, teenagers. My son will be twelve one day, thirteen the next. I’m sure he’ll look the same, sound the same, BE the same—but he’s also excited about TURNING thirteen. Turning INTO someone who is more his own and less mine. 

Aging feels… different as an adult, but every birthday IS an opportunity to take stock, and to be grateful for the years we’ve lived. Who knows what we might be turning toward, or into, when we turn a year older.

Today’s poem introduced me to a new word for longing or yearning—and it showed me a way to use that expansive desire as a frame for the magic of everyday life.

Sehnsucht
by Michael Dumanis

My daughter says six is her favorite year ever
though she suspects that seven will be better.
Her dress spins down the corridor.
It’s made of butterflies and billowing
like the memory of a chocolate souffle.
Was I ever more like her than like me,
shoulders not flagging, breath hot
with awe as I sidestepped each stone, 
the promise of age like a helium balloon
dragging me behind it on a flouncy string?
My daughter tries to show me everything
she’s left a mark on: painted clay,
a smiley-faced cotton ball perched on a stick.
Her name in all-caps on an envelope.
Does she already somewhere in her spleen
or pancreas, in the soft tissues and marrow, sense
that the impossible goal is, for all of us,
just to keep going? No, she is not grieving
over Goldengrove whatever. Six is her favorite
year ever, I feel not so much nostalgia
as Sehnsucht, the desire for something
missing, vertigo under the infinite sky.
We crane our twin heads as a falcon or drone
pierces the cloud cover into the future.
How to get closer to the mystery.
Older, she will do whatever: name a new nation,
isolate a microbe, hear the whales mutter
the muscadine water. Every time the regimes change
she will dance Swan Lake, bending her knees
at the requisite intervals. Attagirl, daughter!
The economy continues to show resilience
in the face of despair and mass depredation. 
My daughter is swan. Is crab grass run riot.
Meanwhile, I am becoming unrecognizable
to everyone except myself, and it does not matter:
before it is time to resemble no one 
I have had the mixed fortune to resemble most things.
My shadow lingers in the corner of the photo of the painting.
I may not know more than a bedraggled llama
craning its neck past the impregnable fence. Still,
I participated in the world. I wore the ceremonial 
knee breeches required by protocol. 
Led her through ferry boats and Ferris wheels,
this ardent daughter clinging to my hand
as though it was God’s hand on a church ceiling.
We took turns licking the strawberry ice cream.
In this knowledge, I feel content.

“Sehnsucht” by Michael Dumanis. Used by permission of the poet.