Deer

Today the sky was spoken open by the birds.
Clouds laced the edges of the lot
where my Honda rolled in reverse,
frost terse and steely on the windshield.

You were a fawn this morning.
I the roe, he the buck.
I have been thinking words are useless.
I have been thinking bomb and blech and nightmare.
Fawn, your hoof

A cotton sock stippled yellow and blue.
And you woke, steeped in morning,
two larks pulling wide
the corners of your mouth.

Gratitude

For snowflakes that do a gnat-like hover in the air, neither up nor down, nowhere but suspended.
For your, thus far, hour and forty minute nap.
For fingers that do what my brain tells them to do.
For your shark-like attack of my breast.
For your blue slippered feet, tap dancing out your body-song on the green bottom of the exersaucer.
For a house on the other side of town, filled with mamas and babies who are our friends.
For the red, vintage 50-eras table I so love to write on at Blue Monday.
For January, panting out her last breaths.
For heat and stairs; for brown, pet-safe salt.
For my sister Martha, and her strong body.
For my body, finding its new shape again.
For a husband who loves me and who is not (to the best of my knowledge), having a steamy affair with a co-ed.
For the dream of a house.
For the wide safety net of family and friends and money and love, which is below me at all times, which means I will never starve or freeze, which means I do not have to spend days and days with those worries spinning like a marble through my head.
For can openers.
For on line recipes.
For the time to be grateful and the time to write it down.

Wigs and Worry Stones

On the back of your head is a bald spot. The skin there has been worried into a smooth, pale oval. I know it is from all the sleeping you do on your back, but every time I see it, I think of a gift often given in the mid-90's: worry stones.

Worry stones were manufactured stones, two inches long, that contained a thumb-shaped indentation in the center. Above the indentation, or on the other side of the stone, was inscribed a word, something positive, abstract, and a little elusive: "joy," "faith," "love," hope," etc. The bearer of the stone could carry it in her pocket or purse and, when feeling especially anxious, rub her fears into the stone. Theoretically.

It looks a little bit like God has been doing this to the back of your head.

Today my top two worries are: freezing rain and a rash that has spread across your belly and chest.

This morning, when I went out to write, there were pinprick-sized balls of sleet all across the hood of the car. This morning, when I changed your diaper, there were pinprick-sized red dots across your abdomen.

Usually I am obsessed with image, color, things seen and unseen, but today it is texture I am hungry for. I want smooth skin where the rash resides and I want soft downy hair on the back of your head where you have none.

Already, you are 16 years old and we are at the Clinique counter, looking for skin cream for your belly.

Already, we are trying on wigs for the prom, so that when your date puts his hand at the back of your head to draw your mouth to his for a kiss, he does not feel that patch of bare skin, does not think you have a naked mole rat nested in your hair.

You choose a dark bob with bangs. And your date turns out to be gay. Which makes you terribly sad and makes me terribly happy because at 2am you are back home, in the safety of our kitchen, still in your slithery turquoise dress, your pantyhose, now full of runs, bunched into a nude ball on the table next to you. You put your cold feet in my lap and I nod my head and think how you are still too young for there to be splotches of mascara in the pouches below your eyes.

And I think that night as I do all nights how close I am to losing you--or, perhaps how I have lost you, in some small way, but you have come back to me. In this dream my worry is a spell that keeps you safe and brings you home.

The Post That Ends With Smurfette

On Friday, I accidentally dropped you on your face.

Today, I had three hours to myself at the mall. I admired the stray bits of glitter and thread on the floor of the Victoria's Secret dressing room. I imagined your head inside a ladybug patterned hat at Baby Gap. I mixed hot mustard into egg drop soup and and squeezed lemon into a tall glass of water. I bought an indigo sweater with a teardrop shaped hole just below the breastbone.

Then I went back to Ricki and Peter's. Six men in the living room and the scent of trout and sweat everywhere. The Vikings on T.V., scoring touchdown after touchdown.

On the way home, we stopped for gas. You screamed inside the car wash and, when the sun roof began to leak cleaning fluid down the back of my coat, onto the seat, through my pants, I screamed too. Your father laughed.

Maybe I am a little worried that you don't seem to care much about rolling over. But rather than dwell in that worry, I will have a little more white wine from a box and then go and put on the lingerie that makes me look like Smurfette.

Ideal World Schedule

Last night was a good night. You went to sleep at 7:15, then woke at 3am for a feeding, then woke at 7:30 in the dirty gray snow light.

In our living room is a salmon print that Daddy made in Alaska many years ago by dipping a salmon into paint and then pressing the salmon's body into the canvas. The print is beautiful; in places it is possible to count the scales. That a dead animal lingers behind the print is not quite so beautiful. The salmon print is framed and taped to the frame is a 4 by 6 piece of scratch paper. At the top I scribbled the words "Ideal World Schedule." In the Ideal World Schedule you go to sleep at 7 and wake at 3 and wake again at 7:30. You take a two hour nap in the morning and then an hour and a half nap in the early afternoon and a 45 minute cat nap just before dinner.

Truthfully, this is not my ideal world.

Truthfully, I am not sure what my ideal world looks like anymore.

"today my beautiful child eviscerates me" --Rachel Zucker

Today my beautiful child smiles when I walk naked from the shower. Today my beautiful child bends over the green plastic of her exersaucer. Today my beautiful child will feel the whiskers of Mr Meow against her cheeks. Today my beautiful child does not live in Haiti. Today my beautiful child could have five glasses of water if she wanted them.

Last night, on the news: "there is no money in Haiti today, water is the only currency"

Water coins, water bills. Where does water keep her money? What sound does water make when she is stretched thin? What does water think when she is separated from the larger body of herself, when she is only two drops on a dark lip? Where does she keep her silver? Her gold? Her romance novels in which the tsunami weds the brook?

On the news, a Minnesota woman is worried about two orphans in Haiti who are scheduled to become her children. The camera pans to a toddler bed with rails and a pink fleecy blanket. Then to paintings of the faces of the children, hung on the bedroom walls. "I thought it would make them feel more at home," she says.

Home as the place where your face is already hanging on the wall.

I admit, I find this slightly gruesome.

The woman says the orphanage has confirmed that the children have survived the quake but are now without food, water or shelter.

Here is the horrible secret dark thought that slithers its way through my brain once before I banish it with a broom, its black adder rattle softening off into the distance: maybe the quake was a good end to hard misery.

Never, never, never. Each human life of the same worth, each life worth fighting for, people living in poverty content or happy or happier than white upper middle class banker CEOs of our Prozac nation. My liberal self embarrassed to have had such a thought. My white skin glaring stupidly back at me.

Last week, traffic stuttered to a halt for a suicide.

If you throw yourself off a bridge during rush hour, you may not have a desire to live, but you do have a desire to be counted.

No one arrived home on time.

In the Ideal World Schedule I am home now, already, preparing you for a play date. I am not home now. I am shirking the Ideal World. I don't know what it looks like anymore.

Strangers

So I arrived at room 450 in the Roseville Radisson and the door opened and a woman stood there with glasses and thin hair in a low ponytail and a smile that said "I see you are an obsessively worried first time mom with whom I shall be patient but not overly so" and then she said "I had nine foster children at one time, it will be OK to leave her here"

(and I won't bore you with the details of how we came to this moment, just the details of the moment)

I put your changing pad in the bathtub (no water) of room 450 at the Roseville Radisson and I put you on top of the changing pad and I covered you with a quilt, I pulled the orange satin edging of the quilt just up to your hands so you could feel the smoothness and then I wound up your mobile music box (no longer attached to the mobile) and I set it on the side of the tub and the tiny hammers inside played their song and I left the door open a crack.

I opened the black diaper bag then and showed the woman the diapers and the change of clothing and the two ounces of milk in the black freezer pouch. I showed her your squeaky giraffe and the ring with the smaller rings around it and the knit finger puppets from Peru (monkey, chicken, parrot) and she said "everything will be fine."

Then I took a piece of paper out of my purse and scribbled my cell phone number on it and I scribbled her phone number onto the large (now missing a corner) piece of paper. My hair was wet from the pool and then a shower and I was wearing the necklace with the definition of poet on the front and the brown turtleneck that shows how my belly still bulges and I was going to tell the woman other things, the million things someone should know about you before bending down to lift you from your nap but Grandma Ricki was late and carrying a bag under each arm so we left, I left you with a mostly strange woman in room 450 of the Radisson Roseville and I went and ate a turkey-cheese-avocado panini at the Ginkgo cafe on Snelling Avenue.

A boy mixed plaster for Diego Rivera in the book I read.
Then, in the lecture called Young Adult Historical Fiction, Anita Silvey (who was giving the lecture) flashed a picture of the cover of Grandma Ricki's book and at that moment in the dark lecture hall Grandma Ricki reached over and took my hand.

When we walked back across the Hamline campus, carrying four airpots of coffee but without the coffee, Grandma Ricki said "I could die tomorrow. I mean, professionally."

And in room 450 of the Roseville Radisson you were still wearing your fleece sleeper with the red arms and the reindeer insignia and you had tears on your cheeks. The woman with the thin hair in the ponytail and the nine foster children gave you back to me.

I took you back to room 421 and nursed you and cried about how I left you and how I was going back to work soon and would leave you again and again. And Grandma Ricki said "think of the mothers and babies in Haiti right now" and she meant think of how lucky Thisbe is in comparison, but instead I just thought of them, of the people sleeping in the streets and all the houses showing their broken ribs and I cried harder.

In the car, on the way away from the Roseville Radisson, the music box mobile tried to finish its unwinding, just a hammer beat or two at a time, but each time was a surprise. Each time the thing I thought was emptied of song kept singing.

Bath Time for Thisbe

Then:
Squalling red licorice wrangling writhing skinny bone twisting navel air puncture queen

Now:
Pale peach cream swell of skin round eyes blue moon hovering sashayed breath baby girl