19 Pregnancy poems

Rocked in my mother’s pregnant amble, and born into forty-five years in the dark, the egg this child was also swayed in the arts of lovers I took before you, fed with me in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year to new waves of wander, fish and flower, liqueur of each region, and bread of each village, each cup of moonlight in the long sward between my window and the Wannsee. The egg he was heard and voices of everyone I desired and held itself in some deep hormonal bloom, taking whatever was remarkable in my life into its possibility. We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain, to listen for the rumble of wild boar in the Malvan woods. We climbed into planes bound for cities we’d never visit again and skin we’d summon with sobbing. And so, my husband, as you dream of owning this child, remember that he has ridden in my fire, bathed in my blood, and sipped at the breath I drew the first time I saw what Rodin had clawed from stone before he turned from Claudel and went home for dinner and a clean shirt. Remember that this child is collage of everything before you, frangipani and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes of macaroni, and French cherries from an old woman in Auvergne who insisted on the gift because it was so marvelous to see a woman traveling alone.

The phone call, from my wife. She’s hungry, she’s pregnant, someone kicked her in the stomach—we have to. I say yes, but the reply I keep to myself is, We don’t have to do a goddamn thing. A dog. I’m talking about a dog I would have otherwise left to starve. Now though, five years since, I love this animal, Lucy, more than I can most people. • A boy names his dog and five cats after our Lucy. The boy, my brother, born in Henry Ford’s hometown, lives now in Lebanon, which the Greeks called Phoenicia, and they tried but failed to subdue it, same as the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, the British, the French, the Israelis. There, my father built a house with money earned in Detroit— as a grocer, with social security. Also there, the first alphabet was created, the first law school built, the first miracle of Jesus— water, wine. • On the first day the bombs fall they flee and the boy asks to go back for Lucy, the dog. As for the cats, No. They take care of themselves. One week into it he wonders who feeds them, who fills the water bowls. Maybe the neighbors, the mother thinks out loud. The father is indignant:Neighbors— what neighbors? They’re gone. The mother is stunned: What do you mean, gone? After a month, everyone forgets or just stops talking about the animals. During the ceasefire my father drives south, a thirty-minute trip that lasts six hours—wreckage upon wreckage piled on the roads, on what is left of the roads. The landscape entirely gray, so catastrophic he asks a passerby how far to his town and is told, You’re in it. • My father finds three of the cats, all perforated, one headless. The dog is near the carport, where it hid during lightning storms, its torso splayed in half like meat on a slab, its entrails eaten by other dogs scavenging on the streets. Look. They’re animals. Which is to say, there are also people. And I haven’t even begun telling you what was done to them.

The woman who cannot bring forth her child: go to a dead man’s grave and then step three times over the grave, and then say these words three times: This is my cure for the loathsome late-birth This is my cure for the bitter black-birth This is my cure for the loathsome imperfect-birth And when that woman is with child and she goes to her lord in his bed, then let her say: Up I go, over you I step, with a quick child, not a quelled one, with a full-born one, not a doomed one. And when the mother feels the child is quick, go then to a church, and when she comes before the altar say then: Christ, I said it. This has been uttered. The woman who cannot bring forth her child: grasp a handful of her own child’s grave, and after that, bind it in black wool and sell it to peddlers, and say then: I sell it, you sell it. This blackened wool, this sorrow seed. Translated from the Old English

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels, all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with your own face on.

A flashlight rolls over the walls of a cave, searching, until the transducer comes to a halt low on my still-flat belly. The doctor says, "There's definitely a kid in there." Easy for her to say—she sees this all day. But it took us years to get to this point. Years in the dark. Months of nothing and never. Her expert eye interprets the grainy screen, which I can't stop reaching toward, pretending to point to features but really just longing to touch the image, as if it were somehow more there than in me, this tiny, blurry, leaping bison or bear, something from Altamira or Lascaux, from the hand of an ancestor— the first art we know.

Novel unbegun, half-loaf rising, lighthouse northward and anchor south. Lemon to grapefruit, you sleep-step sidewise, turnover, pop-up, tongue in the mouth.

Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow For many a moon their full perfection wait,— Haste, precious pledge of happy love, to go Auspicious borne through life's mysterious gate. What powers lie folded in thy curious frame,— Senses from objects locked, and mind from thought! How little canst thou guess thy lofty claim To grasp at all the worlds the Almighty wrought! And see, the genial season's warmth to share, Fresh younglings shoot, and opening roses glow! Swarms of new life exulting fill the air,— Haste, infant bud of being, haste to blow! For thee the nurse prepares her lulling songs, The eager matrons count the lingering day; But far the most thy anxious parent longs On thy soft cheek a mother's kiss to lay. She only asks to lay her burden down, That her glad arms that burden may resume; And nature's sharpest pangs her wishes crown, That free thee living from thy living tomb. She longs to fold to her maternal breast Part of herself, yet to herself unknown; To see and to salute the stranger guest, Fed with her life through many a tedious moon. Come, reap thy rich inheritance of love! Bask in the fondness of a Mother's eye! Nor wit nor eloquence her heart shall move Like the first accents of thy feeble cry. Haste, little captive, burst thy prison doors! Launch on the living world, and spring to light! Nature for thee displays her various stores, Opens her thousand inlets of delight. If charmed verse or muttered prayers had power, With favouring spells to speed thee on thy way, Anxious I'd bid my beads each passing hour, Till thy wished smile thy mother's pangs o'erpay.

Her sense of smell is ten times stronger. And so her husband smells funny; she rolls away from him in the bed. She even smells funny to herself, but cannot roll away from that. Why couldn’t she get a more useful superpower? Like the ability to turn invisible, or fly? The refrigerator laughs at her from its dark corner, knowing she will have to open it some time and surrender to its villainous odors.

It was the time before I was born. I was thin. I was hungry. I was only a restlessness inside a woman’s body. Above us, lightning split open the sky. Below us, wagon wheels cut land in two. Around us were the soldiers, young and afraid, who did not trust us with scissors or knives but with needles. Tear dresses they were called because settler cotton was torn in straight lines like the roads we had to follow to Oklahoma. But when the cloth was torn, it was like tears, impossible to hold back, and so they were called by this other name, for our weeping. I remember the women. Tonight they walk out from the shadows with black dogs, children, the dark heavy horses, and worn-out men. They walk inside me. This blood is a map of the road between us. I am why they survived. The world behind them did not close. The world before them is still open. All around me are my ancestors, my unborn children. I am the tear between them and both sides live.

I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office. I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility. There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man. I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly. I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying? I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions. Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter. I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children. So I packed my little bag as if I were going to the hospital and I left a note and the Wearever pots and sterilized nipples upon the glass missiles, and took the cradle board than an American Indian friend had given me for the baby and that had made my husband snort– “You’re not going to carry the thing on your back, are you?” I took some money, the car, some books, paper and pens, my walking shoes, an unwieldly IBM electric typewriter, my pregnant belly and a dozen cloth diapers, and I went out. I knew how to carry a baby and how to carry a poem and I would learn how to have a baby and even how to have a poem. I would have enough milk for both. I would learn how to walk with them. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, how to have a husband and a matched set of Wearever pots.