A child asked me, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands… (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6”)
Fever took me by surprise. I was eight years old. I lay in my room, under a blanket covered with pictures of pink roses, and the room began to whirl. I could not understand it, found it curiouser and curiouser. The ceiling tilted and dropped. The centrifugal force created, somehow, by my own body felt as though it would fling me out of it, as though I had become a spinning galaxy of heat and light and pictures and roses that made a body unneeded. I was puzzled but not alarmed. I was on fire with fire that did not consume.
My mother brought in the glass thermometer, held in under my tongue, kept bringing in trays with ginger ale and aspirin, water, sugary puddings after the sun rose. When the sun fell, my fever broke. I was still here but changed. I could hear the pink Queen Elizabeth roses growing on the other side of the wall, hear the pellucid slugs chewing the light green grass, even the music of starlight streaming through the willow tree I once fell from, when the wind was knocked out of me. Where did it go? I wanted to know. I felt then that whole universe unfurled from my home. Soon after that fever I wrote my first poem.