~*~
Weaning
Another night like the glassine surface
of a lake and she and I gone
under.
In the kitchen I unlatch
the plastic clasp of my nursing bra,
prepare to watch
the second year of the war on television.
In its blue light,
objects glow on the table -- a ring of toast,
a medicine bulb, the distance
I’ve traveled from myself.
Sharp focus on another life,
on what our country has done:
“Shock and Awe.” Here is the baby
the same age as the war.
Out the window she watches silver coins of rain
and I hold her
closer as we slip under the surface
of the world, under the meniscus
of a glass of water held in shaking hands.
We can’t stay there. Change the channel:
a child lies in the street, cinder and ash
while the president warns
of “grave danger.”
while I remember the pregnancy test
I took the first night
of the bombing, TV landscape
flashing yellow, lit by lasers
so America at home could watch a city be destroyed
“There will not be a safe place in Baghdad when we attack”
Now
two years later we know there was no threat.
We do not count dead civilians
Now my daughter’s body
will begin
loosening from mine.
We will rise up into what is unseeable. We have no choice.
~*~
Recto, Verso
A seam in the dirt divides past from present: rope I once set down
in the sand of the levee, or the girls asleep with me between them,
as if the three of us will ever again be a single body. In bed, the girls now only
want stories that forecast their presence. I should tell how I brought them,
after the storm, to the other city, how we stood between
the levee and my parents’ house, on River Road, how we walked along
the floodwall, tangled branches, dirt dried and yellow-rusted while the river
was still silvering, a clench of sunlight. I wouldn’t let them touch
the trees, the rocks, the sticks. I carried them in my arms.
Make this scene a book open on a table—The dirt, The water. A page we
turned. A page ripped out. The present. The past: mud bank, river’s splintered
light, the crystal birch, a boy who tried to ground himself in my body.
The time before the time before I lost the borders of myself.
Spanish moss knotted over tree limbs, and I stood up, I walked away –
In bed, now, here are two pages joined together. I hold my girls and try to
remember. Girls who won’t remember this, how I am pressed between them
like a leaf on tracing paper.
~*~
Overlaying
All that first Fall with my daughter, I wanted the world to turn safely
miniature: the baby finally asleep in a small pool of light, the book open on my lap.
--
Outside the train shuddered along the horizon, the National Guard patrolled, guns slung on their shoulders, ice clotted on grass scattered with trash beside the Halal Market.
--
Everyone said: don’t sleep with the baby. Too dangerous. Keep your distance.
--
As if the book could cancel the world, I read:
in another century a mother’s body broke open again and again. Her seventh child. another boy she sets to sleep beside her, body slickened with his sweat, with hers.
All night she watched him, eyes gritty with exhaustion, while outside in the fields the war
went on, war that took her husband, that could take her son.
--
On the subway on the way home from my night class, my chest burning, breasts heavy with milk, on the subway on the way home to feed the baby, on the subway, stopped again, the police walking through each car, on the subway stopped again for Police Action or Random Backpack Searching.
--
The infant rocked in his mother’s arms as if she were a wooden chest. As if she were a boat.
A boat filling with water.
--
Then the baby shifted on my lap. I set her down to sleep beside me, breathed in her salt-smell. Uncurled her fists, flattened her fingers, tendrils and roots, over the sheets.
--
That Fall, I wasn’t writing but a book always had its own rhythms in my hands: the book the page the paragraph the sentence the word the word the word equaling or at least promising safety,
--
Now if I stepped outside that circle of light, there was always the television, the new war repeating. No safe distance.
--
In the book, the mother imagined a child requiring nothing. What if he choked on his own breath? What if she dragged the quilt, dark as a scab, over his body? What if a small body shuddered shut? She closed her eyes. Her eyes were burning.
--
Outside another helicopter circled the sky. I lay down next to the baby.
--
The word made flesh. For nothing?
--
The woman could just lie down beside, along, on top of, the child. She could cover the child with her body. Drown out his cries with the press of her mouth. She could lie and lie and lie and in the morning it would be over—
--
That Fall, I told my class: change your writing by changing the space of your writing
and I gave them tiny notebooks, paper grocery bags, sheets of newsprint telling stories of the war, and I explained the origins of the palimpsest, lines overlaying lines,
and I said, erase your own words with your words, and the baby breathed and
breathed and outside the other world wouldn’t stop tunneling through this one.
~*~