Liquid Flesh

In a light chocolatine room with blackout windows, a loud clock drowns in soft dawn’s syllables, crisscrossed with a broken cloudiness I’d choose as my own bedcovers but cannot. My choice of sleep or sky has no music of its own. There’s no “its own” while the baby cries. Oh, the baby cries. He howls and claws like a wrongly minor red wolf who doesn’t know his mother. I know I am his mother, but I can’t quite click on the word’s essential aspects, can’t denude the flora or disrobe the kind of housecoat “mother” always is. Something cunty, something used. Whatever meaning the word itself is covering, like underwear, that meaning is so mere and meager this morning. Mother. Baby. Chicken and egg. It’s so obnoxious of me: I was an egg who had  an egg and now I’m a chicken, as usual scooping up both possibilities, or what I used to call possibilities. I used to be this way, so ontologically greedy, wanting to be it all. Serves me right. My belief in the fluidity of the self turns out to mean my me is a flow of wellwater, without the well, or the bucket, a hole dug and seeping. A kind of unwell, where the ground reabsorbs what it was displaced to give. The drain gives meaning to the sieve. As I said: a chicken who still wants to be all potential. Someone who springs and falls, who cannot see how many of us I have in me—and I do not like them all. Do I like us? Can I love us? If anyone comes first it’s him, but how can that be? I was here way, way first. I have the breasts, godawful, and he the lungs and we share the despair. For we are a we, aren’t we? We split a self in such a way that there isn’t enough for either of us. The father of the baby is sleepy and present in his way, in the way of fathers. He is devoted like few fathers, and maybe hurts like I hurt, like no fathers. I don’t know what someone else feels, not even these someones who are also me. Do they hurt like I do?  Why can’t they tell me, or morse or sign: let me know they know where and how and why it hurts? Or something? What is the point of other people, being so separate, if we can’t help a person get that pain will stick its shiv into anything, just to get rid of the weapon and because it can? For if we share ourselves then they, too, must also be in so much pain. I can hear it. Oh, my loves. The wood of the crib, the white glow of the milk (which must have siphoned off the one and only pure part of me, leaving me with what, toxicity or sin or mush?), the awful softness. I’ve been melted into something too easy to spill. I make more and more of myself in order to make more and more of the baby. He takes it, this making. And somehow he’s made more of me, too. I’m a mother now. I run to the bathroom, run to the kitchen, run to the crib and I’m not even running. These places just scare up as needed, the wires that move my hands to the sink, to the baby, to the breast are electrical. I’m in shock. One must be in shock to say so, as if one’s own state is assessable, like a car accident or Minnesota taxes. A total disaster, this sack of liquid flesh which yowls and leaks and I’m talking about me not the baby. Me, this puddle of a middle, this utilized vessel, cracked hull, divine design. It’s how it works. It’s how we all got here. Deform following the function . . . But what about me? I whisper secretly and to think, around these parts used to be the joyful place of sex, what is now this intimate terror and squalor. My eyes burned out at three a.m. and again at six and eleven. This is why the clock is drowning, as I said earlier. I’m trying to explain it. I repeat myself, or haven’t I already? Tiny self, along with a tiny self. I’ll say it: he hurt me, this new babe, then and now. Perhaps he always will, though thoughts of the future seem like science fiction novels I never finished reading. Their ends like red nerves chopped off by cleaver, not aliens, this very moment, saving nothing for later. He howls with such fury and clarity I must believe him. No god has the power to make me believe anything, yet I happen to know this baby knows a way out. This dark hole closing in on me all around: he’ll show me how to get through the shock and the godlessness and the rictus of crushed flesh, into the rest of my life.