I haven't written for a long time because poetry escapes me. I still want a baby. It's been a quiet winter. I read the book Ahab's Wife and dreamed of swimming with whales which felt like flying underwater. All winter, while I slept, I would join the whales, leave the world above to join the blue, quiet power of the deep water.
My sadness about the loss of my pregnancies was buried for so many months that when it did well up, it didn't even look like sadness, it looked like dissatisfaction with my life, like snarly, wolfish teeth-gnashing. I'd feel my body tightening, my mind stalking around to find something to criticize, then someone would say something really kind to me and I would just start crying. Every time it took me by surprise.
As spring unfolds, thrashes, and shines, as the days lengthen, I notice I am saying my baby's name to myself. I don't think of her as a little angel hovering over me or even as a person--she wasn't but a possibility--still, I feel her as a familiarity within me. Sometimes, this familiarity and I are accompanied by my memories (my fondness?) for my dead grandmother. I'll say to her, "I miss you. I miss your tile floor and the smell of your cigarettes, the sight of cowbirds in the orange trees; I miss watering your petunias, the sound of the filter running and snaking in your swimming pool. I miss your scratchy handwriting, and your long face, your beautiful hands." I might pause. "Do you know about my lost babies?"
Before she passed, my grandmother told me that she talked with her own mother, gone two decades, daily. "We're as close as ever," she told me. To my grandmother, conversations with her own mother served as a kind of prayer. I think my conversations with my lost-child-presence and my grandmother are the same. Afterall, to whom would I pray? I don't know who my god is: god of light, god of seasons, god of births and deaths, god of chaos and destruction, god of renewal...but I know that it feels good to converse with the unseen and so I continue to do it often and softly.
