The Images I Know

The rain is clicking against the windows and the belly-rumble thunder is distant and occasional. Your eyelids are red and puffy and a blotchy rash is blooming down your back, across your belly, blushing out below your ears and between your fine blond hairs. Your hair itself is matted with sweat and sticky with the antibiotics that we failed to make you swallow. Your body is a fiery machine whose only job is to get better. When you are awake you are barely awake, eyes at half- mast, head rolling back from time to time, moving toward and away from a distant shore. We watch Elmo and Barney. Sometimes you want a book open too. Cat in the Hat or Green Eggs and Ham. The rhymes lull you, I think. You want only to lay on Daddy or lay on me, often squirming side to side for 20 or 30 minutes, trying to find the right position, the one that might make you finally feel better. You repeat "ow. ow. ow. ow" or "no. no. no. no" or "mama. mama. mama. mama." the tone both wheedling and hopeful and pathetic and heartbreaking all at once. You want us to take it away and we cannot and this is what it means to suffer.

We took you to the doctor for a battery of tests today and nothing was conclusive. High white blood count, blood oxygen 94 (lower than it should be), a slightly pink left ear, a ruby red throat--but no strep. No pneumonia. Likely just a virus with lengthy fangs. We put you on antibiotics just in case the infection is bacterial. But so far three days of this and no improvement.

As usual, there is so much more to mention. A visit from Grandma Gail and Grandpa Michael. Trolley rides and ship tours and forays into the wading pool. I spent a fantastic weekend in Iowa. Daddy spent time considering golf clubs and inserting rubber pieces into the wheels of my car so the steering wheel doesn't shake when I hit 70mph. But right now, those events seem like they happened ages ago. Sick time stretches out on either side of us. The wheels on the bus go round and round and round and round.

I also started teaching a class called Women's Writing, a class I kind of hope doesn't exist by the time you get to college. Anyway. We discussed Anne Sexton today. A poem called "Fortress" that describes a nap with her daughter. Here are my two favorite stanzas:

Darling, life is not in my hands;
life with its terrible changes
will take you, bombs or glands,
your own child at
your breast, your own house on your own land.
Outside the bittersweet turns orange.
Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat
branches, finding orange nipples
on the gray wire strands.
We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples.

...

I cannot promise very much.
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me and watch.
A pheasant moves
by like a seal, pulled through the mulch
by his thick white collar. He's on show
like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed,
one time, from an old lady's hat.
We laugh and we touch.
I promise you love. Time will not take away that.



I love you, sweetest darling Thisbe. Sickness makes the love acute, and harder.