19 Pregnancy poems

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation            without It is                                           within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical            with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or — ” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception                       Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which          goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative   poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises          races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth           moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was — is — ever — shall — be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles — Epicurean — And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church — Man and woman God made them — Thank God.

Inward lush unpetaling purpose in pink blooms of sleep, and I no longer needed to be separate. I was living there then, at the edge of the sea. And my friends came to visit, trying for a baby, not sure how to read me on that island of dozy sunlight. And there it was: familiarity edged with fear, the way we’d feed each other sandwiches and wonder if we should have wanted something other. We walked the folded cliffs over conifer fronds and mud runneling rocks slick with dropped fruit and rotting camellias to pause at the first ridge. We looked through high pines at the blue moving tides, then his finger caught a snag in the water and another and we saw — glinting fins wheeling the sheen, thousands playing in pods coming closer like the souls slippering into our bodies, attaching to matter as flippers angle into a ferrying strand. We too are a species, I realized. We too could know that as joy.

1. Waking First the low drone of uilleann pipes, the river of the spine just barely quivering: the froth on a half-drunk pint of Guiness shifting as the bellow breathes. 2. Waiting A pressure sprouting in the back—the joke I told about having eaten a pumpkin seed to astonish the moon- faced toddler gawping at my beach ball belly in the grocery line. 3. Pitocin What the     hell is this no one said     chaos I can't find the     cerulean beach, the sun-     rayed trail through     rain-cooled woods can't    find your face the     soft flamenco music     hurts I hate     it you turn     off it     now 4. Lidocaine Flying bullets, bats, then, finally, birds. Swallows sky-diving for mosquitos above the quiet reservoir at dusk. Iridescent synchronicity, twisting together as if on strings. You must listen hard to hear the soft applause of (closed in unison) a thousand wings. 5. Parturition Hosannas in the skull halls: I see as if from above a body brought to its knees, every one of its live cells singing Hosanna for "we praise you" and "please save us" as being trains its way into the lighted room, the ravaged world.

For Alyssa As anyone is apt to, you began as someone else’s symptom. As in other beginnings: drawn lots, blood, some dancing on the heads of pins and inside needles’ eyes, cellular revelry, hopping of microscopic turnstiles. Lucky guest, grist, leapt long odds to spark the tinder in the dark. Then, the subcommittees met: made merry in duplicate, triplicate and so on, much of themselves, divided and divined and concurred. All sides insides, pre-ambulatory perambulation meant: sure ambit, short orbit in a warm aquarium set to the muffled music of a single sphere. As in other beginnings: parting seas, the future’s violent egress, screams and sutures, aftermath’s average agony on umbilical belay but soon to solo, unfold all those origami limbs to test the inevitable debutante bawl. Wrest from the nest and the rest is you, dear: dressed for the bright lights in bits of my sister.

All things within this fading world hath end, Adversity doth still our joyes attend; No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet, But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet. The sentence past is most irrevocable, A common thing, yet oh inevitable. How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend, We are both ignorant, yet love bids me These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when that knot’s untied that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none. And if I see not half my dayes that’s due, What nature would, God grant to yours and you; The many faults that well you know I have Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave; If any worth or virtue were in me, Let that live freshly in thy memory And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms, Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms. And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains Look to my little babes, my dear remains. And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me, These o protect from step Dames injury. And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse, With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse; And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake, Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

At nights birds hammered my unborn child’s heart to strength, each strike bringing bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone among women who cursed their hearts out, soured themselves, never-brides, into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy. Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice; shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.

Some thought it was because of all the babies I suddenly seemed to be having. Others, that I should pay for the damages. Fact is, I wasn’t getting any older, so I bought a small aquarium, and skipped town. Took up with a toy store owner until he left me for a more beautiful robot. Took up with a reader of instructional booklets. Never mind. I was lost. By the time I arrived at Mrs. Greenaway’s, it was clear I was nowhere at all. In exchange for room and board, I’d rearrange her furniture, her birthmarks, her quiet animals, until they took on more satisfying shapes. Sometimes the shapes were simple, like a mustache or a pipe. Sometimes they were more complicated arrangements, like the one of dead Mr. Greenaway’s closed barbershop. Over the years, as Mrs. Greenaway and I became more and more vague, the shapes did too. For identification purposes, we’d give them names like She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She Was Hurt and She Was Hurt Bad or The Insides of Doctors. One night when I was working on a piece I thought I’d call Symphony, Symphony, the shapes began to slip out of my hands. At first, as Mrs. Greenaway remembers, the sound of broken glass. Then the trumpets. Then the terrible music of all those babies I once seemed to be suddenly having, marching, like soldiers, in rows. Then their round wet bellies coming towards me. Mrs. Greenaway still talks about how expertly they gathered me into their tiny arms. And how they took me away not like a prisoner. But like a mother. Into a past I still swear I never had.

i. a wife will wean

I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks and squarks, gravitons and gravatini, photons and photinos. Our sprout, who art there inside the spacecraft of your Ma, the time capsule of this printout, hurling and whirling towards us, it’s all daft on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we’re anxious to make contact, to ask divers questions about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss the whole shebang of the beginning and end, the pre-big bang untime before you forget the why and lie of thy first place. And, our friend, to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we’d die for you even, that we pray you’re not here to subdue us, that we’d put away our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.