A Little Tooth by Thomas Lux
A Little Tooth
Thomas LuxYour baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s allover: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
MARGINALIA
The houses were burning and we could hear the wail of sirens as fire trucks raced past us. My sister, on her way home, saw the black clouds from far away and felt her heart leap to her throat. We stood before the television, watching the flames. Then I fixed myself a bowl of champorado and cold milk.
Goodbye, September.
ABOUT THOMAS LUX
Acclaimed poet and teacher Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946 to working class parents. He attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. He began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. Critically lauded from his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry gradually evolved toward a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Lux died in early… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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