Once in a while someone will ask me how becoming a parent has changed me as a poet. (Usually it's a poet without kids. Who else would want to know?) For years, I was at a loss to say. I sure as heck didn't start writing poems about my kids' adorable quirks, because it's nauseating enough when people verbally wax about their kids' adorable quirks. Imagine it in verse!

Of course, parenthood has changed me irrevocably as a person. So of course it's made me a different poet — even if, by and large, it hasn't altered my subject matter or stylistic preferences. Most significantly, I think, I have grown less cynical with age, less dismissive of sentiment. I suspect I am open to a greater range and depth of emotion — though I also suspect my 24-year-old self would ecstatically smack my 37-year-old self in the face for claiming so.

Not many of my poems tackle parenting issues directly. But here's a poem I began writing last April which questions both my place in the world and my performance as a parent.

Gross, Gorgonzola

To my left a window, to my right a child.
And somewhere out that window is my other

child, down streets that wind to her school,
and other children down other lanes, and some
of them could have been mine, if I'd signed

or stood in line to foster or adopt, one could
be forking this same lettuce or saying, gross,

gorgonzola, and sitting between me
and the view of sad brown grass the sunlight
kicks through the window. If it grows

they could mow it, then spend
the pittance of their allowance on jujubes

at the movies which make their own
windows in dark caverns some distance
from mine, windows in which appear

still more children, whose lives
of magic or panic or spastic action

never happened, but mirror
the youths of scriptwriters and the empathies
of child actors, whose lives in turn

are weird and often come out sadly
as the lives of those unfostered kids

out there at some mysterious remove.
And if a window I tried to hang by hand
had fallen differently, and sliced not my employer's

ankle but one of my own dear arteries,
if the shock had knocked me off the roof

to a jagged landing, then what would become
of this child on my right, in whom
windows open into vistas

of possibility, and I'm afraid
that in every passing minute another one

closes—I'm slow with the stick
to prop it, or fast with the word
to smash it, even as I say stop

playing with the cord, can't you see
I'm trying to type here, I hear a broom swish

to sweep up glass somewhere inside her,
and it's too late, when I ask how
were her carrots, and she asks for candy,

it's too late, but I say yes, help
yourself to some small thing.

Scott Beal will lead a workshop this Saturday, March 20, called "Unleash Your Outlandishness: Poems of Audacity and Weirdness." It will be full of fun exercises designed to get people thinking and writing in unusual ways. There may be tarot cards and/or food coloring and/or finger puppets. And more! No experience necessary. The workshop will take place from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Sweetwaters Cafe (123 W. Washington St. in downtown Ann Arbor). The cost is $50, and all proceeds support independent publishing and arts education for kids. Register at http://www.dzancbooks.org/dzancday/.