38 Baby poems

Here’s your mom, here’s your dad. Welcome to being their flesh and blood. Why do you look so sad? Here’s your food, here’s your drink. Also some thoughts, if you care to think. Welcome to everything. Here’s your practically clean slate. Welcome to it, though it’s kind of late. Welcome at any rate. ____ Here’s your paycheck, here’s your rent. Money is nature’s fifth element. Welcome to every cent. Here’s your swarm and your huge beehive. Welcome to the place with its roughly five billion like you alive. Welcome to the phone book that stars your name. Digits are democracy’s secret aim. Welcome to your claim to fame. ____ Here’s your marriage, and here’s divorce. Now that’s the order you can’t reverse. Welcome to it; up yours, Here’s your blade, here’s your wrist. Welcome to playing your own terrorist; call it your Middle East. Here’s your mirror, your dental gleam. Here’s an octopus in your dream. Why do you try to scream? ____ Here’s your corncob, your TV set. Your candidate suffering an upset. Welcome to what he said. Here’s your porch, see the cars pass by. Here’s your shitting dog’s guilty eye. Welcome to its alibi. Here are your cicadas, then a chickadee, the bulb’s dry tear in your lemon tea. Welcome to infinity. ____ Here are your pills on the plastic tray, your disappointing, crisp X-ray. You are welcome to pray. Here’s your cemetery, a well-kept glen. Welcome to a voice that says “Amen.” The end of the rope, old man. Here’s your will, and here’s a few takers. Here’s an empty pew. Here’s life after you. ____ And here are your stars which appear still keen on shining as though you had never been. They might have a point, old bean. Here’s your afterlife, with no trace of you, especially of your face. Welcome, and call it space. Welcome to where one cannot breathe. This way, space resembles what’s underneath, and Saturn holds the wreath.

Her body like a pomegranate torn Wide open, somehow bears what must be born, The irony where a stranger small enough To bed down in the ox-tongue-polished trough Erupts into the world and breaks the spell Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell. Now her breasts ache and weep and soak her shirt Whenever she hears his hunger or his hurt; She can’t change water into wine; instead She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.

(excerpt) I A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink, Might tempt, should heaven see meet, An angel's lips to kiss, we think, A baby's feet. Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat They stretch and spread and wink Their ten soft buds that part and meet. No flower-bells that expand and shrink Gleam half so heavenly sweet As shine on life's untrodden brink A Baby's feet. II A baby's hands, like rosebuds furled Whence yet no leaf expands, Ope if you touch, though close upcurled, A baby's hands. Then, fast as warriors grip their brands When battle's bolt is hurled, They close, clenched hard like tightening bands. No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled Match, even in loveliest lands, The sweetest flowers in all the world— A baby's hands. III A baby's eyes, ere speech begin, Ere lips learn words or sighs, Bless all things bright enough to win A baby's eyes. Love, while the sweet thing laughs and lies, And sleep flows out and in, Sees perfect in them Paradise. Their glance might cast out pain and sin, Their speech make dumb the wise, By mute glad godhead felt within A baby's eyes.

The youngest living thing in L. A. was my baby. The oldest living thing was the wind. The wind grew well in that city in the desert. As did my garden of well-tended cement. As did my baby, whom I held like a heavy statuette. I named him Mill at his birth  . . .As the wheel goeth by drift ofwater . . . And he grew and the wind blew and we lived in that desert and . . . no rain. No rain, no river. No sound of water. But for— The fountain water. The official fountain. Which flowed. Every day. Every day the baby slept. The baby breathed. The fountain flowed. It flowed imperceptibly. As if its water were fast asleep. We stood on the fountain’s shore: woman + newborn. We made one totem. I named the baby Easter Island. We played I Spy. I saw: coins at the fountain’s bottom. Eyes. Copper cataracts, winking through the water at us. I held the baby close. I held the baby stiffly. I brought the baby to see nobody. I saw: statues in the fountain’s water. Statues in tall grasses on the shore of a sea. I turned to tell somebody. The city had disappeared into complete silence. There was only: the baby. We were watching the water wrinkle in the wind. In the distance, maids were ironing. Overhead: jets drew ciphers in the blue with their chalk. The drift of the maker is dark. Beware that by the drifts thou perish not. The statues, the statues in the strange fountain were looking at us. They were weeping and turning, turning and weeping. They might have seen the city shimmering in the sun and wind, and known . . . It was a city with no one in it. If a door somewhere on the street opened, it would always be . . . no one. It would be a bad draft that had blossomed. I longed for meadows white with drifts of snow. I named the baby Drift. In the winter I had planned to bring him north. To a barn’s eaves, to hear icicles drip. To prepare him to grow up in the path of the next great glacial drift. City whose sky was white jet streaks. Whose houses were apparitions of asbestos flakes. Whose homeless sipped wind from tins. Whose only water was the strange fountain. Angel, my angel, my sweetheart, wake up. See the foam on the wave, seethe tornado, the hurricane. We stood on the fountain’s shore. The wind blew particulates of rug powder, of lemon-scented floor polish. The maids of the city were cleaning so completely. And mutely. There may have been other names I gave the baby. Zeno sweet Zeno Little fellow little fellow Vertigo I said to the baby, We will stand here until there is snow on the mountain. I may have meant to say fountain. We peered all day into the strange fountain. I said to myself, That is just your face stiffening around your cheeks. That is just grass growing at your feet. I held the baby all the time, and he never ever cried.

We speak of the pain of childbirth, referring, of course, to the mother, but what is pain to the mother, the one through whose body the course unwinds? She understands already what kind of world she must return to, how it daily hones its many edges against human skin, unlike the child whose untried limbs inch toward it, pressing now so firmly against her he feels for the first time the pinch of bone against bone and is seared by the friction. Isn't he the one on whom the real burden falls, the one to whom resilience means nothing yet? His tender skin like a small measure of cloth unfolding before the blade under which he will, for a lifetime, bruise and heal: Crush of the long descent, grip of the steadying hands, brush of breath against cheek, even the constant barrage of the microscopic, the tiny plink-plink of the dust motes knocking against him before custom makes him numb to it. No wonder the startled mouth cries out, each pore suddenly hungry in the withering, nourishing light.

After we picked you up at the Omaha airport, we clamped you into a new car seat and listened to you yowl beneath the streetlights of Nebraska. Our hotel suite was plump with toys, ready, we hoped, to soothe you into America. But for a solid hour you watched the door, shrieking,Umma, the Korean word for mother. Once or twice you glanced back at us and, in this netherworld where a door home had slammed shut forever, your terrified eyes paced between the past and the future. Umma, you screamed,Umma! But your foster mother back in Seoul never appeared. Your new mother and I lay on the bed, cooing your birth name, until, at last, you collapsed into our arms. In time, even terror must yield to sleep.

I hold my two-year-old son under his arms and start to twirl. His feet sway away from me and the day becomes a blur. Everything I own is flying into space: yard toys, sandbox, tools, garage and house, and, finally, the years of my life. When we stop, my son is a grown man, and I am very old. We stagger back into each other's arms one last time, two lost friends heavy with drink, remembering the good old days.

The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, the chain of the difficult spine. Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear, with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No, no desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.

From now on they always are, for years now they always have been, but from now on you know they are, they always will be, from now on when they cry and you say wryly to their mother,better you than me, you’d better mean it, you’d better hand over what you can’t have, and gracefully.

Sweetheart when you break thru you’ll find a poet here not quite what one would choose. I won’t promise you’ll never go hungry or that you won’t be sad on this gutted breaking globe but I can show you baby enough to love to break your heart forever