October 9, 2009

More and more you are managing to poop through not one layer of fabric, but many. Yesterday you pooped through your onesie, your star sleeper, and two layers of the Moby wrap. One poop, four layers. Downstairs, we change you on Luxy's dog kennel. We lay down cloth diapers below your bottom before taking off the disposable one since your other favorite pastime is to pee while being changed. Also on the changing table: two baby hats, a tupperware container filled with miniature headbands, pink bows, and pacifiers, folded receiving blankets (ladybugs and roses) and wipes.

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. The Republicans think this is just another sign that he cares more about the rest of the world than about America: “One thing is certain — President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.” Personally, I think it's a poor idea to criticize someone who has just won the Nobel Peace Prize for not caring enough about the "right" people. Why do we continue to think that our fates are separate from the fates of the rest of the world? Why do we continue to believe that we can be truly free or happy if millions of others are not? To see helping the rest of the world as somehow in opposition to helping America is both selfish and ignorant.

And yet, I have been finding a huge amount of joy in you, Thisbe. Am I not truly happy? And what is happiness to you? You snort and almost snarl as you open your mouth for my nipple. Sometimes, the entire time you nurse, I watch the one small tear that has formed in the corner of your eye. It sits there while your snorts turn into sucks of contentment. The lashes on your closed lids stick together because of the tears. Do you experience happiness or simply the absence of hunger and pain?

Snow showers are possible tonight. The cold will soon be embedded everywhere: sidewalks, metal railings, toes, teeth. This morning, when I touch your hands, they are white and cool. A green vine with a thousand leaves climbs up our comforter. The sunlight falls in stripes across it. Your father gets out of bed first, to feed Luxy and start the coffee. Although I'm a writer it's sometimes difficult to know which bits of this life to give you, what mundane details you might want to know.

October 8, 2009

So on a foreign shore where you came to understand
Joy--your arms full of gladness, it streamed, a fountain--did you,
Reluctantly but choosing it: get up and turn back home.

from "Self-Story as Spheres of Egyptian Industry" by Monica Ferrell

1.
On the foreign shore, rocks are not brutalized.
Seething beasts are quieted with the raising of a brow.
On every continent of skin, a pond of melted bone. You
scoop it up and press it to your eyes. A hurting flush.

2.
At a bus stop, a woman with a peacock feather in a zip lock bag
smiles for the very first time. It streams, a fountain.

3.
Cerulean tiles in a box waiting to be sealed to a church wall.
Sunlight, tinted ruby, glints off the right clasp of the tiler's overalls.
He touches the clasp without looking. The metal is warm.

4.
Turning away from sour breath
into a wind of candied orange.

5.
An Amish man, pant cuffs rolled, knee deep
in Caribbean blue, watching jellyfish smooth
through the sweet plain of water. His hat
makes a shadow on the water; the water
loves the shadow on her back.

6.
One day, the bathtub is filled with razored whiskers
as if a "Complete Works of Dickinson" had come unglued
and all the dashes fell there. And somewhere
in a wicker basket lined with polar bear fuzz
are all the letters, jumbled. So you
straighten your bow tie and dip your hand in.
The letters feel like peeled grapes. You take
enough to write gold and home
and bird and fable. You heart begins to ache
like hers but you are glad to be of use.
Blight, sound, wild, slant.

7.
A herd, galloping. One breaks ahead.
A league away, lit by a largess of sun
you can feel the hoof beats of that one, distinct
from the others. The sound enters
through your feet and fires higher, up
through legs, liver, lungs
until it has plugged into your heart, until
you go where this animal goes, Joy
and a herd of others at your heels.

October 7, 2009

Sunshine today and everyone looking radiant. I met the women from the book group at James Gang Coffee Shop and two of them were wearing cranberry colored shirts. Sheri's daughter, Lauren, had her senior pictures taken today, first on a bridge and then in the tall grass behind their house. In one photo, Lauren held the guitar from the Guitar Hero video game. In another she posed with Crackerjack, her overenthusiastic terrier. "My arms are exhausted," said Sheri, "from holding up the filter. I spent all day getting ready for the shoot. I made my husband spread mulch all over the backyard. I was going to have him put the rowboat in our pond but he drew the line at that." I imagined having a yard big enough to hold a pond. What is involved in pond upkeep? This summer, near Pepin, Wisconsin, your father and I watched a woman cleaning the pond beside her house. The algae was thick and green and her net hung on the end of a long stick. According to the owner of the B and B where we were staying, it took the woman all day long, every day, to clean the pond. But she was retired and this was what she wanted to do.

Yesterday I dressed you in the shirt Katie Sexe bought for you at the Galleria when you were only 8 weeks old...in the womb. There is a fuzzy pale green hippo on the front that you can't yet appreciate. Nevertheless, in the faculty lounge at St. Olaf yesterday, laying on my lap, with Grandma Ricki and I peering over you, you smiled. You don't know what you are doing yet, but you are certainly trying. Your mouth opens wide and the corners of your lips turn upward just slightly. Then they pull back into a grimace that shows off your gums and your eyes squish shut. You stay frozen in this expression for three seconds and then either your face melts back into softness and you open your eyes or you begin to scream. I wonder what it is that shifts (or doesn't shift) inside of you at these moments.

Last night the Twins beat the Tigers in a regular season playoff game. One of the last that will be played in the Metrodome. Minnesotans have decided that we prefer to watch baseball outdoors, ironic considering that last night was 45 degrees and rain. Today also I received an e-mail from Tupelo Press saying that they are not interested in my manuscript, though it is "quite riveting, and never less than rewarding." Clearly, the e-mail is a mass e-mail and it is somehow more insulting to receive a compliment that is not truly meant for me than to receive no compliment at all. I would prefer that these sorts of rejections not affect me but already I have considered numerous times how boring this particular post is, already I am thinking that my one audience member (your father) is bored to tears and has stopped reading, already I am thinking it was a huge mistake to have an actual reader for this blog, already I am contemplating taking up pond cleaning as my vocation, already I am doubting whether I could truly consider it my vocation if I only took it up as a result of my failure as a writer. But how satisfying to see the green growth disappear from the surface, to have left, at the end of the day, your own reflection wavering back at you.

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who's to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

from "The World Doesn't End" by Charles Simic

I call you baby duck, love duck, little bug. Today I will call you cricket. I love you, cricket.

October 6, 2009

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between tress, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

"Beginning" by James Wright



Late June, 2009. Iowa City. Anjali drives Dan and Rebecca and I out to where the farmhouse used to be. The farmhouse where Anjali and I lived during our first year in the Workshop. Now there is no house, no hole, no outline of a foundation even. There is corn and there is grass. Anjali parks on the grass and we cross the dirt road to stand at the edge of a field of soybeans. Rationally, I know they are fireflies, but if I was a six-year-old girl I would be certain it was fairy dust, hovering and shimmering in the twilight. Across the tops of the darkening plants, moving into and out of their own light, millions and millions of them. As though the stars, come down to rest awhile, could not stop from yawning. Thisbe, it was beautiful. You were inside me.

Today I look through "The Vintage Book of Contemporary Poetry" to find a line to give you and it all seems dunked in gray. Age, loneliness, closed mill towns and loose floor boards; a sullen wife and panic rules. I do not want to give you any of this.

But each day you are getting closer to all of this. It is horrible and beautiful to watch knowledge come into you. Today, in the gray and rainy light of 8am, you reached with your small fist toward your father's face. You lay beside one another in bed; you touched his eyebrow, his cheek, his hair. You are most interested in borders, the place where one thing ends and another begins. When you see me your cry quiets slightly. You know me (the scent of my breasts, the timbre of my voice, the outline of my jaw) in ways that I do not know myself.

October 5, 2009

Each time I am dunked in the green, green
sacramental water, I glare shamelessly
as she shrieks and kisses me, gripped in air;
I do not know if she loves me or cares,
if it's suffering or joy behind her tears.

from "Chiffon Morning" by Henri Cole

Your baptism is scheduled for Sunday, November 29. Your father wants the font moved to a different spot in the church, wants the whole congregation to gather around you, wants to lead them there by singing "Shall We Gather at the River."

Meanwhile, I worry about what we will do with so many relatives circling around on Thanksgiving weekend, how our oven never cooks at the right temperature, how our kitchen is too small to hold an entire Thanksgiving dinner. Meanwhile, I worry about what I will wear to the baptism. I want soft gray tights, three shades darker than the fall sky. Grandma Ricki wants you in the Christening gown she wore and I wore. Grandma Dorothy wants you baptized the first Sunday of advent so when we light the first candle every year we can remember your entrance into the Christian community.

You were born to "Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom," a Taize chant that was part of our birthing mix. And though I have always loved baptisms, it now seems to me false somehow to do the ritual so many months after your birth.

I wonder why the water in Cole's poem is green. Green, green actually. You hate having water poured over your head; I worry that you will scream through the baptism and that this will somehow reflect poorly on me. As though I have already failed to raise you properly. And I am embarrassed to feel this way. Another part of me thinks "scream in public while you can, ratchet the air with the honesty of your voice, you will know the burden of docile politeness soon enough."

October 4, 2009

Clothing is darkening along with the leaves. Forest green sweaters and navy sweatshirts and gray V-neck sweaters. Beside me in the coffee shop, a man meditates (eyes closed, forefinger and thumb touching forefinger and thumb, deep breaths) until his cell phone rings, at which point he bends forward at the waist, eyes still closed, while the Carleton students at the next table look at him and then at one another with raised brows.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat I read about two patients who, in the late stages of syphilis, are awakened. They become "frisky" and imaginative, full of vitality. One of the patients, asked to imitate a drawing of a square with a circle inside of it instead draws a three dimensional carton with the lid wide open. When asked to do it again he draws a man holding a kite. When given medication and then asked to draw it again he does it correctly, although his drawing is smaller in scale then the original and the lines are more shaky, less sure of themselves. Sacks writes:

What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here--that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease!

Of course, what I wish for you, dear Thisbe, is that you continue to draw cartons and kites for a long time. As a poet, I feel like I am constantly trying to return to that state, the one where, when told to draw a tree, I draw my own vision, complete with lightning bolts flying from the branches and the bark curling into 43 moustaches. [Tree example also taken from Sacks--lest you think I delight in plagiarism]. It is difficult in this world to trust the truth of the carton and the kite, for me this is the greatest difficulty. That should be the end of my diatribe for today but...

In the next chapter, a man called Mr. Thompson whirls though continual amnesia, remembering nothing for more than a few seconds at a time. Sacks observes that in order to construct our own identities we need narrative; that is, we are always placing the events of our lives into a story that ultimately defines who we are. Mr. Thompson becomes something of a creative genius because he needs to create this story of himself at each and every moment in time. Sacks writes:

For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy. The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing--and he must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.

So Mr. Thompson constructs a world filled with details that delight people, that make him call him "a riot" but "what comes out, torrentially, in his ceaseless confabulation, has, finally, a peculiar quality of indifference...as if it didn't really matter what he said, or what anyone else did or said; as if nothing really mattered any more." Reading that passage made me think of a certain kind of poetry, a kind I have most certainly written, in which the writer leaps from image to image, from world to world or notion to notion but without any real stakes. Sacks talks about bridges over the abyss. This poetry is like bridges over the abyss but without the threat of the abyss...and the truth is that a bridge ceases to maintain its beauty when it is no longer rendered fragile and vulnerable by the water or canyon or riverbed below it. And this whole idea runs counter to the advice I gave you only paragraphs before. Which is to say: imagination only gets you so far. An image must be placed in a precarious situation in order for it to become art. By precarious I simply mean that it has to matter.

Hmmm...my hour is almost up, Thisbe, and you need to be fed.

October 2, 2009

It is raining and at home you are crying. I came to the coffee shop because I was reaching the end of my rope and now all I can do is think of you crying and Daddy moving you up and down through the air on his forearm and growing steadily more impatient.

I am tired. My breasts are huge and none of my shirts fit. My pants also do not fit. Two days ago I cut off 10 inches of my hair. I am not positive the new haircut fits either.

We moved so quickly from weeks of mid-70's weather following your birth to this evil stepchild version of fall: 50 degrees and rain and gray. This is the second day where the light is the same at 8am as at 1pm as at 5pm. Then finally there is a darkening and the rain is light enough that we cannot hear it if the windows are closed. And the windows are closed.

Yesterday, after I snuggled you into the Moby Wrap, you pulled your head out and looked around. I took picture after picture as you used your neck muscles for the very first time. You looked like a heron or a crane, a bird whose neck is long enough that the head seems somehow separate from it. After a few minutes, your head grew too heavy and you had to plant your cheek against my chest again, where you immediately commenced gnawing on my collarbone.

I can hear you crying. I can see Daddy's patience wearing thin.

What else? You will be one month old tomorrow. One month already. And truly it seems like we brought you home yesterday. Dear Thisbe, I see now how quickly the rest of my life will go now that I am consumed with watching you grow. I worry that I will die and you will lose your supply of breast milk. In the car I contemplate whether they could keep me alive just to pump the milk. I contemplate whether I should write a living will with that stipulation in it. I imagine myself laying in a hospital bed, numerous wires hooked to my chest, an intubation tube in my mouth, and a stalwart nurse holding the two suction cups to my breasts while milk drips into the tiny bottles below. Then I worry that I will die and thus never get to see you grow older. This terrifies me more than anything else I can think of. Besides, of course, the fear that trumps all fears: that you will die and I will have to grow old without you.

I can hear you crying. And so it's on with the raincoat and into the old Honda. Wipers on low. Ricki's leftover pot roast for dinner. We will snuggle on the couch to eat, Daddy's computer on the coffee table, "Revolutionary Road" playing, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and their unhappy marriage filling the screen. This afternoon we put you in your boppy and placed the boppy in the easy chair in the corner of the bedroom. Then we undressed. Over Daddy's shoulder I watched your open mouth. Afterward, I lay in bed with you, our heads bent together. Your tiny nose was cold. I pressed my nose against it and you slept. How many more days of this will I be given?