April 13th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The blanket half-bent and spun around his torso.
He sleeps on his side, his arm reaching for a mother,
his brow furrowed in his sleep at the hollow spot.
The blanket half I see is white afternoon.
I can’t believe he is still breathing.

Pressed tight against my skin at night I throw him off
to see if his hands move.
My body can suffocate like blankets.
My blanket body, hot and thick.
The river-map on his left eyelid: transparency.
My not-blanket baby.
The poem folds without creases around my chest.

I wipe milk on the hour.
The brown dog traces circles with his feet before he folds onto the blanket.
Fur is a magnet that clings to underline words.
The bamboo baby is asleep in my arms.
I can’t believe he is still breathing without arrest, a metronome chest.

He is a drawing of a baby on my lap
that pushes against the pulse in my wrist and sends my arm to sleep.
His cheeks are silk with nerves inside.
His shirt descends to shadows and rises to light, shadow and light on repeat.

April 12th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

And then after the shadows and reflections of shadows
the baby cried in the background. I felt it behind the fifth button.
Babies have chakras, too. Tiny circles of meaning and portent.

I don’t know what it means when he cries
but those sounds are a blurry language. He cries words. I didn’t know.

My memory, my sky. My arms ache from never not holding.

The dogs whistle their sorrow behind the closed door
after having stepped in the tulip bed for the third time

this afternoon.

I let them free. The baby watches and makes the sounds he
sounds for the first time, long ohs, long ahs.
Tulips grow even where I stepped when I didn’t know.

I thought I was alone yesterday with the long ohs,
stuck in my planet of crying sounds
but the bird-blossoms on the magnolia grew
and the tulips shot out their tongue stalks.

My face was silent but I rubbed graphite across
like we used to do with the gravestones.

April 11th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The paper and the sand dollar look the same
to me at first glance.

I close my eyes and I can’t picture the baby–
too much emotion to see straight.

It used to be that way with the boys I thought I loved.
I took it as a sign.

Now the sand dollars have released their tentacle hair
and no longer squirm down our windshield toward the ocean.

The baby moves his arms like he’s swimming while awake at night,
the streetlight and dog nightlight sharpening shadows where I wanted light.

Please let me live long
and him longer.

April 10th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

April 9th, 2010 | Category: happening | Comments (1)

All of our dinnerware is made by Heath Ceramics.

So beautiful. Solid and simple. We have the Chez Panisse line.

They’re a company that throws each bowl and cup and plate in Sausalito, California. We went to visit the factory there. Jack had to go to the bathroom, so he got to see the workers throwing pots. We touched every item in the factory store and finally settled on two blue water pitchers. And I bought a t-shirt. And I bought a bookbag for the house, though I don’t think I’ll get to use it because right now it’s on Rosie’s shoulder and she’s walking out the door to go eat at the Chinese Buffet.

Ah, home. So different from our dinner at Chez Panisse just a few nights ago, which we visited mostly to see our plates in action. Heath Ceramics! Chez Panisse! California I miss you.

April 9th, 2010 | Category: happening | Comments (1)

It was the weekend before Easter, and we were in the car driving home from church. Palm Sunday. I had a palm bent into a clumsy cross in my back pocket. The palms they burn and turn to ashes in 33 days shy of a year. In a week Jesus would die. The mass was filled with sadness. For weeks we’ve not sung as much as we usually do throughout the year. We were being solemn, trying on solemnity. The service on Palm Sunday ended with bells sounding, sounding, sounding. It said in the program that the bells are a tone painting that signify the nailing into flesh, Jesus’ wounds. We stand and listen, and Henry doesn’t squirm. When we walk out of the church, the priest has tears under his eyes. In a week Jesus will be dead.

I always cry lately on Christmas Eve. There is so much joy, but every year it’s the same: we celebrate the birth of a child, but in a few months we will be mourning his death. So much foreshadowing. All the sacrifice from someone who is perpetually kinder and more wise than I know how to be.

I was trying to explain this in the car on the way home that Palm Sunday. I was trying to talk about my sadness because of the foreshadowing, because every year we celebrate and mourn, year after year, celebrating and mourning, then the tone painting with the bells and the tears in the priest’s eyes. We have to believe that we are worth the sacrifice, and that there is something after all this pain.

I don’t believe in Jesus, Rosie cut in. She was in a sour mood. I’ve heard this from her before, and I truly don’t care. All teenagers doubt and defy and feel sullen once in a while. But this time I just felt too sad. I got out of the car and hid with the dogs, Moby stretched like some solemn and understanding pieta across my lap. Rosie was instantly sorry that she had hurt me, but I couldn’t articulate why it made me so sad. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, she said when we walked in the door, but I snapped that I didn’t care if she believed in Jesus. Then I disappeared.

Because I’m not always sure if I do, either. I believe that a man existed who had a presence. I believe he had the sort of power to change the world that some people have, like Obama maybe. Some beauty, a capability to help people rise to their highest selves. I don’t know if he was more than that, but I don’t care. I have no reason to care if the story is true or not: because the story is beautiful. That beauty matters more than any scrutiny of fact. Fiction, it has been said, is the lie that tells the truth. Myth isn’t exactly true for any time, it’s simply true all the time. I’m not sure why people are so concerned if any of this god stuff is really factual. It’s beautiful enough to not worry about that. There was a human who so loved the world that he died for us so that we can live. The tone painting.

Good Friday we were in an airplane, suspended. On Sunday the world was made of light. Jesus died on Friday, and on Sunday he became light. Tonight, driving along the ocean, struck by the sky and its constellations, I felt whole. There is so much sadness in death, but then we get to become light. I believe we are recycled, that in this world nothing is thrown away.

On Sunday our tiny cottage by the ocean fogged up with the heat from the oven, and our small world glowed abstractly. Easter was filled with light. I don’t know if I exist, but this life is beautiful enough that arguing about whether or not I am truth or fiction is just quibbling.

April 7th, 2010 | Category: inward | Comments (1)

is not possible while traveling with three kids, or not for me. We’re out exploring for at least twelve hours a day. I will have to start it up when I return home on Friday.

April 7th, 2010 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

Layers of attachment. Henry teaches me. Because in the beginning I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I didn’t understand how innocent he was. I didn’t believe that someone could be all-good as he is. All-knowing and all-not-knowing.

In the beginning he would cry and cry and there were thoughts from us — is he manipulating us? A nurse came over and saw me nursing Henry when he was two days old and laughed, He’s ruling the roost! He’s using you as a pacifier! And I wasn’t sure what to believe. A boy. And boys grow into liars and teasers sometimes. I didn’t know how to behold this kind of beauty.

He opens up my arms and releases any tension in my lungs. He does no wrong. He manipulates nothing and no one. His want is his need. Transparency.

Gisele Bundchen had her baby about a month before Henry was born. Ah, my obsession with celebrities. And maybe it’s that English is her second language, but when she speaks, it’s translated to sound almost mythical. Interviewers asked about her birth and she said that it wasn’t painful, she said that she kept thinking, with every moment of intensity, I am getting closer to meeting my child. They asked her what his name is, and she said he has no name, to her he is simply her beloved. She said to look at him is like looking in the face of an angel.

It sounded too cheesy at first, but of all the things I’m supposed to be reading and analyzing, Gisele Bundchen’s words stick with me. Looking in my child’s face is like looking in the face of an angel. Like looking into a clear white sky. Transparency and innocence. It irons out the pain in my shoulders and the dissonance in my heart. He has no name. My beloved. My sweet boy. We are born pure, I didn’t understand until now. This most beautiful boy.

April 7th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment