One beloved child of mine enjoyed sucking on her index and middle fingers as if juicing, with abundant percussive slurps, clicks and smacks. She’d pat a pony, then stick her fingers in her mouth before we could get to the faucet. One infection followed another, and we became determined to stop this self-soothing habit. We tried pepper paste, tried mittens, tried sitting by her bed and plucking fingers from her mouth. Months passed. One day, without a cause discernable to us, she stopped, grown into new ways of finding her peace.
I think of poems that originate in anxiety, revel in anxiety, only to resolve at last in the final stanzas with some momentary, lovely perception — say, a butterfly — into transcendence. And I hear this sound of my baby daughter’s, this rhythmic slosh and kazoo guzzle of tiny fingers encircled in coral. Feel those sharp, fast-sprouting nails. Skin with ripples from constant immersion. Recall the insistent tides of that sound until finally, she would be lulled to sleep by her own music, and her little hand would come to rest by her ear, in silence, silence, silence, and we would find a moment of reprieve. The self-soothing poem is after all, a kind of soporific. And sometimes, this is just what we require, to write through anxiety into a tranquil space, and just the poem we need to read.