The loss goes underground this time and is not a beautiful grief. I grieve the world; the violence in me, the imperfection, the the shuddering nonchalance, the contradiction, the war. I do not feel close to this baby. I do not feel close to myself. I long for what I once felt for another baby.
Things noticed:
At Micheal's soccer practice, little girl in a billowing yellow dress is climbing a steel post in a playground beside the school. She is maybe six years old. Her back is to me. The dress is a balloon, a parachute, a flower. She uses her bare feet to grip the post and hand over hand pulls herself to the top, fueled, it seems, by pure determination. She clamps her feet around the post for the last stretch and taps the top with her sunny little hand. She slides down and the dress billows around her muscular legs. It begins to rain but she doesn't notice.
I am walking home from the coffee shop. It is sunny and dry, an October so perfectly lit that the body forgets it's a human thing and wants to follow the geese south. I spy a squirrel who acts, as squirrels do, apprehensive at my approach, hop-climbing out of sight, and without really thinking about why, I pause and speak to it. "Aren't you a beauty? You are so pretty," I tell her, "so delicate and well-made." To my surprise she stops, and hop-climbs toward me, rounds the trunk so that I can take in her perfect profile gripping the base of the tree. She is suddenly curious and unafraid. I continue to compliment her and she stays still, twitching her head and her magnificent tail as if to show them off. I think how observant her eyes are, how plush her tail. I think she is the size of my lost babies. A bicyclist whizzes by and she is gone.
I dream that there is a baby, my "Turner's Baby," but it's not real; it is a model shiny and plastic, not a living thing. "Oh," I say to the doctor, "but it's a boy."My husband takes my arm. "That's not our baby," he says.
"Are you sure?"I ask as he leads me away.
I dream of rivers colored by tannin and carrying traces of cyanide.
I dream of totem poles, ancient and cracked being dipped into the rivers and coming out new.
There are babies everywhere and their faces are dirty. They are crying for mom, for not-mom, for something to put in their mouths.
I wake up and my body craves a tiny body beside it. I can tell you, you who think that this is in my mind, that it is in my body more. My body craves the heat of the child it made, craves the fingers and toes. This is not something I ever knew to long for. This is the craving of my milk-engorged breasts, of my aching middle.
And still the year rambles on with her births and her deaths, humming her common, melancholy refrain.
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