I found Gladding’s poem, “Blue Willow,” in Poetry 108, an anthology of poems that Billy Collins selected, and immediately felt as if her words cast a magic spell, pulling me into the poem so strongly that I wasn’t just reading the words on the page, I felt as if I was inside the poem, somehow inhabiting the space she had created with the words on the page.
How did she do that?
Reading between the lines, there’s a mystery contained in the poem’s first line:
A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate
There’s the image of a pond that she brings to mind, not just any pond but one that “deepens toward the center,” and you can almost see the pond getting darker in the middle where the water is deepest, in the center.
And then she compares the pond to a plate—and that comparison helps you to see the pond even more clearly because we’ve all seen how plates have that slightly deeper area in the center.
And it’s not only that she’s showing you the pond, she’s raising the question: who is giving this description of the pond? And why?
And she gives us the answer to these questions in the next two lines:
We trace its shallow rim my mother steering
my inner tube past the rushes where I looked
This is where I think she’s pulled me fully into the poem by adding to the vision of the pond. Now we’re in the shallow edge along the rim, and we discover the narrator is a child floating in an inner tube, being pushed/steered by her mother. And I feel as if I’m in the inner tube with her, part of this memory she’s sharing, and, like her, trying to see past the rushes. What’s there? What’s she looking at? What comes next?
And the answer is revealed in the next line:
for Moses we said it was a trip around the world
How I love the way the rushes remind the narrator of a memory, a story that she’s read (or been told or heard) about Moses, the baby, placed for safety in the rushes…
And I also love how the mother and child say their joint venture—the mother steering the inner tube with her child in it—is a trip around the world, and the child imagines sailing around the world.
And we become part of their imaginary game, wondering where we’ll go next.
I’m fully inside the poem here, inside the child’s imagination, inside the adult poet’s memory of this precious time, this scene of childhood unfolding, this time without punctuation, a time when moments and imaginings flow one into the next, as if time is an endless river that will never end.
And the poem goes on, taking the reader on an imaginary voyage to China, pushing through willow branches overhanging the shallow rim of the pond that tickle her neck, seeing swallows overhead that later the child dreams about joining.
This is a poem about childhood and feeling safe within a mother’s grasp yet curious about exploring the world around her and in her imagination. And it’s a poem about how time feels to a child like it will last forever, and how the adult poet (in the last line) knows it can’t last…
If you’d like to read the poem, visit: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-146/blue-willow/
And if you’d like to know more about Jody Gladding, visit:
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