Nurture

From a documentary on marsupials

I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for

an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal

rescue. They are warm in the

throat. I suffer, the critic

proclaims, from an overabundance

of maternal genes. Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn. Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn. And had there been a wild child-- filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called

in one nineteenth-century account-- a wild child to love, it is safe to assume, given my fireside inked with paw prints, there would have been room. Think of the language we two, same and not-same, might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl From “Nurture” (Viking: $17.95; 63 pp.). Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 and was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981-1982. She is the author of four novels, eight earlier volumes of poetry, a collection of essays and another of short stories. 1988 Maxine Kumin. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.