The Winding Paths of Bloggery

Gaw has been writing about his older boy starting school. That led him to take note of a poem. And that led me to remember a poem on a not unrelated theme. It's by Jennifer Maiden, and here it is:

Aptly

In case my love unfits her for the world
I watch her sometimes from peripheries
as if I were the child I was
hovering at each playground's edge
debating dumbly with myself -
how to be a child? She does that
so much better than I did, and
it seems she isn't acting. Good:
if something apt about my love
has made her cleanly real, something
in its half critical yielding, or
its whimsical huge pleasure gives to her
a crispness like my silken tough unpruned
camellia and may bushes which she harvests
to thrust in sugared vases with the air
of one who fits them aptly for the world