Spring's Return

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.

Roses

Last night I dreamed that a woman, larger than me, more abundantly built with thick arms, a full waist and large breasts, was near an altar in a darkened church. She was preparing  a baptismal font for the christening of her baby. She was filling the font through a narrow slot just beneath the lip of the bowl which rested on a simple wooden pedestal. As the water poured in, it surrounded and lifted a "cake" of rose petals resting at the bowl's center. As the "cake" of pressed and fragrant scarlet petals lifted with the rising water it began to break apart, petals floating on the surface and within the water. I watched her as if from the shadows, as if from a tandem world, admiring her silent purpose.
        The water continued to rise, almost filling the ceramic bowl. As it neared the rim, an aged priest entered, informing the woman that she was filling the wrong font. The one she was filling was for lost, not living, babies. In that moment, a moment of slow horror, as the recognition of her error registered on her face, I realized that it was in this font that my lost babies had been washed out of the world.  I remembered them, small, brown and delicately formed.
        The woman, in terrible dismay, began sobbing, crying out that she had beckoned the wrong fates. I felt helpless to protect her from her fear that her child was now in danger. I felt a searing agony for her sudden sense of threat, arriving in a moment of such soft, quiet and careful beauty.

Tiny, Hard Little Heart

My uterus has shrunk back to its normal size, but I still feel soft in the middle, as if there is space there, pliant and vacant.  I have been seeing an acupuncturist for over a year now, first to support the pregnancy, then to help me get over the loss, and then again to support the second pregnancy, and then again, the loss.  This week I went because it hurts to take a deep breath.

For the last 10 days have I felt nothing, nothing at all after having lost the pregnancy. People can't believe how strong I am. I seem to be moving on.  I felt strangely fine and report this to my acupuncturist. Sitting in the quiet privacy of the treatment room I tell her the whole story of losing the baby.  I can hear my words enter the air and drop like stones onto sand. It's as if I am reporting facts about someone else. I watch her surprise, how it enters and involves her face, changes just slightly the way she is sitting so that she is leaning forward as if to hear more clearly, as if to comprehend better what I am telling her. Her shock and dismay are curious to me to me and I think, Wasn't this an inevitability? This hard fact? This quiet fate?

There is something about her sincerity that induces a softening, my insides feel like they are beginning to liquify, like I am filling up with water.  I can hear a thickening in my voice as I explain the events. "I can't feel my heart," I say finally. She stills herself almost imperceptibly and nods, leans back. She lets my talking wind down and then takes my pulse. "You're right," she said, "Your heart's pretty disconnected from the rest of your body."  She leaves the room and returns, moments later, with needles. She administers the needles into two points: one in the deep, tender part of my armpit, and the other three ribs down to the left of my heart just far enough so that I can feel the warm pulsation that means she has tapped into my chi, the life-giving force that flows like a matrix of rivers throughout the body. She follows the same procedure on the right side of my body and then leaves me to rest.

The moment the door closes, I begin sobbing.  The sobs came from some dark distant place in my body thundering into the quiet room. Somewhere in the building someone turns on a vacuum cleaner. My body shakes and convulses. Slowly, the sobbing subsides  so that, empty and ragged, I do rest.

When my acupuncturist returns quietly clicking open the door, I explain my wet cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. She nods, "The points we worked on today, connecting the heart and the spleen are often disconnected by shock." So this is not strength I guess. This is denial.

I leave the office feeling as if my joints have been disconnected from my body, like everything has been washed out of me. I don't feel better. In fact, I feel worse.

Days pass. Without the shock, I have only sadness to carry around and it is not elegant or beautiful. It doesn't look strong. It is not impressive. Truthfully I'd rather skip this hurting part because I have already done it once, not so long ago for another baby. I don't want to feel it all again, but I'm afraid I have no choice. I cannot skip the steps of grief and if I try I think that it may infect my life, slowing welling up, hindering my ability to feel other things, like pure joy, like contentment. So I have begun looking at my grief, feeling it, trying to take care of it tenderly as if my sadness were my baby and needed me. Hello sadness, I say to myself. Hello baby. I have even begun to imagine that I might hurt the sadness by denying it, and maybe then I would also be denying the life that was beginning inside of me. So I let the grief live with me for now, for as long as it lasts, hoping that in doing so, I am making room for whatever lies ahead.

Rainier Maria Rilke--10th Elegy

That someday,
at the close of this fierce vision
I may sing praise and jubilation to assenting angels!
That my heart's clear-striking hammers won't fail
to sound from landing on slack, doubtful or broken strings!
That my streaming face might make me more radiant
That my humble weeping might bloom.
Oh, nights that I weeped through, how much you will mean
to me then. Disconsolate sisters, why did I not kneel
more fervently, bending to receive you, and lose myself more
in your loosened hair? 
How we squander our sorrows,
gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration
to see if they have an end.
But they are our winter foliage,
our dark evergreens,
one of the seasons of our interior year,
-and not only season,
but place,
settlement,
lair,
soil,
home.

Coming Down

         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.

Rainier Maria Rilke

These lines from the poet keep running through my mind this month.


Now I am still
and plain,
no more words.

The Body’s Vanquished Possibility:

       

to discover pleasure,

    to utter sounds,

            

floats up and away like

            the Green Moths

            haunting my Mud

Hut, throbbing

softly under strobing lights.

It is true,

surgeons have no faces.

In the aftermath,

                                                      

I am a

a gutted fish

robbed of glut

            with swollen insides

            and a laborer’s breath.

          
            My fingers grub around for memory

            but the child is not here.

          

            Little pantomime,

spinning sufi

                        fetal emperor, unfolding your

            soft digits, fanning

                        the flumes of your almost-gone gills,

            

            I am your almost-mother.

            My eyes marble and flatten,

            Magnolia blossoms fall

            from my thighs.