Steve’s glow-in-the-dark trees.
Yee-haw.
Suck it, monkeys.
(Steve took this photo with a tripod. In real life it looks much more tame, more like two white orb-lines glowing, haunting, in the very dark. Both ways are beautiful. It’s amazing what the camera can see. See three more of his photos on his website.)
that boy looks like my baby.
everybody have kids! you feel cuteness in your gut.
these clothes and dolls (and the images of them) from luckyboysunday.
i must not have been satiated with soft dolls as a child because i want them all now. One blabla is never enough.
I haven’t known how to picture the oil until these pictures:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/oil_reaches_louisiana_shores.html
I can’t bear to look at many of them.
Steve turned 37 this past weekend.
When I met him he had just turned 30.
He really does get better and better.
I made him a book about his garden.
In Anne Carson’s book Nox, there is a page where you see a specific but abstract pencil-drawn shape at the bottom of the page. Then you turn the page and you see a photograph and realize that the previous shape is a tracing of a piece of a photograph — the shadow of the photographer in the snow. It was infinitely more haunting than the shape or the photograph alone, or even if the photograph had been presented first and then the shape.
I made a small book for Steve based on that idea. I photographed the garden, then I would draw a piece of the photograph that I was drawn to. I presented the drawing first, then the photograph, again and again throughout the book. I used Blurb to print it. (I love that site! Why don’t I make books all the time?) Steve looked at the book with Jack, and it became a guessing game — try to guess based on the drawing what part of the garden I’m looking at.
The dog isn’t sorry again, isn’t very sorry
for eating the cat food one more time.
Palm Sunday. The reed pokes through my pocket:
fading hieroglyphs on my thigh.
This is a poem with a horse in it:
A poem with a dog torso, horse-like at least.
He is statue-still, my pieta.
(Someone else get the crying baby.)
The dog’s sadness: dog sorrow collects.
Someone else take the baby just once.
I force dog tears and fold on the twin bed.
Dogs, a whole poem of them.
Of sleeping in my skin. Hurting about nothing.
The fur generating. The fur generating what.
My fur machine that forgives.
There are moments I can’t go back to
that no one else would care to remember:
the ham sandwich I didn’t accept,
the dog in the hot car when I didn’t know.
If I had any second thoughts on grief
then this would be an illustration.
I like the fluorescent under-painting
because it looks like us, neon inside
if you peel our skin off, see.
This dog body all apology.
Don’t be so afraid. There is no tiger.
There is no tiger.
Mothers in their houses shush their babies at last.
Sometimes I stop because it’s time to stop
but usually I stop because I’m afraid.
Church bells. Ninety degrees.
Sweat follows the center of my back like a secret.
The sound of the organ shakes the cut glass.
I am not here. I am floating, tilted, hot.
Sweat like butter in tiny swimming pools all over the church,
all across the pews inside our undershirts
inside my turquoise dress and the leopard-print blouse in front of me.
Sweat makes the organ sing.
It sticks to the walls and alters the acoustics.
It alters the air inside of me.
We are perfumed English swimming pools, Kyrie Eleison, going down.
When my head tilts away, opens up,
when my mouth is dry and my skin is wet,
our organs sing at once so no one voice is heard.
A baby in my arms calling eh eh eh
Eleison. Baptized with salt. My baby,
my euphoria, his hair a thin wet curl
against my turquoise dress. Dresses stick.
Velcro baby.
Velcro song, Mozart clinging
to my tongue and knotting up my hair.
We had just returned from the baptism and I gave the baby to someone who was not Steve or my parents so that she could change his diaper while I rushed to get the table set for the party. I was giving directions to a few people at once and some people were coming up the driveway when I heard Henry crying in the way that means he’s hurt — wailing, unceasing.
I rushed back to him and picked him up and asked what happened and she said she didn’t know. I looked in our bedroom and the chandelier was rocking. What happened? She said she didn’t know. I sat him down and tried to nurse him but he wouldn’t stop crying. I checked his head and his body and he seemed okay, but hurting. He wouldn’t nurse. I ran out of the room and got the baby carrier and he settled inside of it and quickly nursed himself to sleep. I was shaken. Something had happened. A wave of fear had washed over me and I could not recover for the party.
A half-hour later, she confessed to Steve that she had hit his head on the chandelier. She said it wasn’t that hard. She was sorry, she later told me, for not telling me.
An hour later when he woke I saw the open cut and bump on his head. She had lifted him up in the air and whacked his head against the chandelier with its curlicues and glass prisms and metal leaves. I swore. She cried. I got Steve and we locked ourselves in Henry’s bedroom and inspected the cut and the bump. He was cranky, but he seemed okay. I was shaken. This second wave of fear washed over me. I wanted everyone to leave.
I had given my boy to someone who was not me, just for a few minutes, and then there was a wound on his head. The most important and vulnerable piece of us. My baby, completely dependent on me and I wasn’t there. And when he was hurt, I didn’t know how and I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t ice a wound I didn’t know existed. I couldn’t check for signs of concussion or internal bleeding or any other worst-case injury.
I’m pretty sure he’s fine. He probably had a headache yesterday after the accident and maybe a little one today. He’s cranky today, but also I am being the anxious mother who thinks everything is suddenly a bad sign. I am perhaps after all the mother of the child conceived through IVF, those mothers who statisically take their children to the emergency room more than mothers of children conceived naturally. My beautiful boy hurt and there was nothing I could do.
When he was a month old a soda bottle fell out of the fridge when I was holding him and bumped him on the head and then hit my shin — it hurt my shin. He pouted and there was silence and then he cried and there was a red mark on his head for a few minutes.
When he was six weeks old, I had to pee and I was holding him, so I knew I had to put him down on the bathroom rug. A dog tried to follow me into the bathroom, so I was trying to keep the door barely open to slide into the bathroom just as a cat jumped onto the bathroom counter. A zoo! I tried to stop the cat with my shoulder but the door frame and the baby’s head met. He pouted and there was silence and then he wailed.
I was at a restaurant in a tight booth with my parents and Steve this weekend, trying to nurse Henry in a confined space while wearing a nursing cover that Henry was trying to pull off, and he was over-tired and cranky and ready to lose it. I tried to shift him around and it was dark and the wall beside me was dark: I bumped his head against the wall beside the booth. He cried.
Once when our white cat was tiny, after a month of owning him and of trying to protect him from a clumsy 9-year-old and a rambunctious 4-year-old, I had to give him Benedryl and mis-read the instructions: not seeing the decimal point, I ended up giving him ten times too much medicine. Enough that, once I realized my mistake, I had to call the veterinarian emergency facility and they walked me through the steps to make him throw it up. It was too late. The kitten slept a whole lot the next day, but he was fine. And I was crushed. After all that work protecting him, after some snooty attitude that made me believe I was the perfect mother for him, I was the one who had almost killed him.
So I’m not saying I wouldn’t have hit the baby’s head on the chandelier. There are chandeliers everywhere, sharp objects everywhere. And babies are heavy and vulnerable and, mostly — thank goodness, and please, I pray — resilient.
I made this cake, my first public cake, for the baptism party. With lemon peel icing and tulip flags. And I tried to use those piping tools to edge the cake. And I made lemon curd to go inside the cake in between two of the four layers, plus sliced hearts of strawberries and extra icing. It was delicious, though I’m always the critic — the recipe was for a pound cake, but that seemed too thick for four layers. It was hard to swallow that thick cake. And the lemon curd wasn’t thick enough so it seeped into the cake instead of creating its own layer. And I didn’t really know how to ice a cake, so it turned out not as smooth as I had hoped.
A woman at the party was looking at the cake and she said to the woman next to her, Courtney’s getting very ambitious.
The woman next to her said, Courtney’s getting very domestic.
I smiled, but I was hurt, and today I want to throw the cake at her. I can’t fully figure why it hurt me so, but probably because I’m sensitive to the word. Domestic sounds insulated, protected, quaint. It doesn’t sound like a four-layer cake with tulip-flags. Domestic is tame. Interacting with a baby all day does not feel tame. Domestic sounds like the opposite of Ambitious.
I don’t want to be small. I don’t think being interested in making a cake makes me small. The conundrum: I can’t be content with being perceived as only domestic, domesticated, yet I am thoroughly preoccupied and enraptured by the shifting world inside my house. I don’t want to be swallowed up by smallness, yet I only want to consider my small world.
1. a cracked robin’s egg we found on a walk and a clay vase
2. lemons: toot, toot. (bbq sticks and surrendered flag ribbons)
3. flower heights
4. this tulips exists. this tulip grew in our soil.
