toward mount kailash

XVII.

“yes, even sky became a garden.

The clouds banked west like Shiva’s mountain.”

 Deborah Digges: “THE GARDENS OFFERED IN PLACE OF MY MOTHER’S DYING—"

friends: would you take me 
from this hospital

of his birth to hospital 
of his tincture?  north

and then north?  and more north?

and yet more north?

to a commodious 

parking lot?

i'll feel in every pot-hole

and every frost heave a penance, 

and every red and go.

i'll hear every soundless hurry,

hurry, hurry, hurry to me.

it is windy.

it is cold.

i will loose

my sandal straps.

even as it seems a mile

and another mile,

down these halls and walls i'll know

better than my own

mother—

i'll say yes to the flecked blue 
mucosed carpet next to my nose, i'll 

bruise the high wooden railing,

whose curves and lefts then rights

then left again turns get solidly to his light.
friends: meet me at the end of it all.

we'll 

still

be 

alive.

Passage, Cave-in

and what a rebellion
     to leap into it
          and hold on,
               connecting everything,

the past to the future—

                                   Mary Oliver--"The Hermit Crab"

                 

XVI.

They wouldn’t let me leave

unless I could pass

all the air

left to lay beneath the stitched

x over x of my uterus,

my scabbed belly.

Laxative and water and solid.

Trying to push it out was dangerous,

more than labor.  And like you my boy

it was slow in letting go.

Ultimately, because I was so desperate

to leave,

I lied.  Of course I’m farting.  Absolutely.

Can I go now?

Later I would say

(only to myself because it seemed

so small a consequence)

that I didn’t feel

like I’d given birth

at all—

places that should have been raw

with urgency's rash

were slick as buttermilk.

Clean.  And tight.

And mute.

bed-rails, doorjambs, shower

walls, I forced myself to walk

to cling to

to clean myself

for the ride

to another plastic bed

a room full of sick babies

and you, biggest bruiser.

while the caverns and turns

in your colon went slowly

dark and descended the way a fresh

sheet might, high in the air,

suspended so briefly it's not

even considered flight, there's a slight

wind dying, a kiss with-

out pressure, a trap

of air and bacteria pulling the dead
cells like stones off the wall

and piling them against the way

out.  but nobody knows.  only
your body.  and it's giving nothing.
not even a cry when i change
your dry, again, diaper...

opulent fat immaculate

XV

mute mammary, my cup is empty.

nothing but empty

for hour after hour day after day.

raised Catholic 

my once wanted to be a nun self  

thinks of Mary,

pregnant by God

or some anonymous Roman

occupier toughing her
at a well,

i ache to prostrate my bloated,

self, collapse

at her plaster feet and entreat

anything resembling milk. 

i could be a new Lourdes, 

liquid rich and miraculous

and I can leave by my pathetic

prosthetic pump

and swim away letting

rivers. 

i'm alone—i’m

not in some French

grotto pasting myself

with mud.  i’m so God

damned dry in this antiseptic

place i don’t even feel

the tingled let-down, the thin gilded

liquid drip down my nipple.  still

somewhere on the edge with Mary

i grope my clay

dissolving, and that thick ring

of colostrum

the size of a Jefferson nickle is all

i want.

opulent fat, immaculate,
i touch it
to my lips.  what else, since
you're sedated
ninety miles away,
to do with it?

a tuesday—and you are at rest

VII.

a tuesday—and you are at rest
and then you are not

you are at once an elastic flash

between what’s exact

and a stream of thawed stone flowing:

the sea the berg the sea the berg the sea 
we drift on

you and me

and this nau-sea,

first cold-cramped, then thermal calm,

walking in a department store

with a friend, and then

a little sprint

of fluid (there was no burst)

a slight pinch and blot

spread on the crotch

of my underwear.  i’d see the mid-wife

the next day.  i’d read and she’d said your head

would press on the bladder,

that i’d pee and feel the need to pee

a lot.

and i did tell her then

but she didn’t check…

and maybe things would have been different.

that casual amniotic leak

sometimes a teaspoon or two

sometimes enough to need new

clothes…

for days: spotting, calling, adjusting

my posture…

rigid.  suppressed.  the wet perception

of piss—but not that,

and not that word—rather:

~—water—~

your sea

moving past you and out of me,

under the the door

but it's days before you’d try

to come through yourself

and,  ultimately, could not…

milking

moon,

  what are you seeking hiding

under my belly?

XIV

the lactation consultant who came

to show me how to hook

up the portable breast

pump had prosperous

brown hair—and a red triangle of cloth

in her right breast smock pocket.

she smiled through the whole

three minute meeting,

through the whir and beat

of the machine

that would vacuum your milk

out of me.

but without your bouquet, your face,

i wasn’t giving up

anything.  the cone cup covering

my swollen teat felt like a hat

some unselfconscious sports fan

or mardi gras spring- breaker

flashing the floats for beads—

plastic balls strung by the millions

Fat Tuesday’s only linger, a forgettable binge.

and me? me,  i’m so FAT i can barely

walk, the fluid under my skin

puffing my feet into water

balloons, I want to pop them

so my shoes fit.  instead

i sit by a drafty window and keep pumping

first right, pull pull pull a drop or two

then left, pull pull pull a drop or two

then right again. then left.  

not enough to paste your little lips

puckered far far away in that untranslatable 
wasteland, our weir broken, the slough

of us afloat, the tide receiding

To Sally Ride, Patron Saint of Orbit

(moon)

you know, in wind

like this,

wind that men in ships

still fear,

I have to think that maybe,

sitting with you

cradled under her arm

God consoles herself

with your light.

It’s the only way she can stand

human grief:

Witnessing.  Reflecting.  Powerless

to intervene. 

XI.

“But please don’t fall alone into the world again.

We will be old, you couldn’t recognize us waving across the arctic

            of remembrance.” Deborah Digges

                                    “Raising the Wolly Mammoth”

shock is a simple glaze- a daze

of feather tender blur.

and you and i were the only ones

in this world—

you, down the hall in a plastic cradle,

a lump of heat illuminating everything

except what was sick and me

hooked to machines.

later, a nurse practitioner would lean

against the one cabinet in the room

and offer us options

on where to take you next:

Boston Children’s or

Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth Hitchcock—

and because we knew a little boy

who’d been cured of his malignant

brain tumor (he was one when he

was diagnosed) we chose Dartmouth.

i watched them get got you ready

for the med-evac.  CHaD was ninety miles

away.  and i’d stay and wait

and lay alone

and drop my glasses in the sink

and a chip, a little chip

where my pupil lined up

went down the drain

with all the rest.  i saw you once

more before you were strapped

and hooked into a new rectangular

plastic uterus.

i called it your moon suit.

After Birth

X.

and after almost two

days

a boy.

and then they took you

away.

  

X-a

because I couldn’t push

you through the molasses black passage

and out another door

they divided and cut back

the carapace between my pelvis,

and those layered internal drapes

blacking out broad daylight,

they dipped in

to your tingling placenta,

unwrapped me and you

and wiped you of blood and vernix

swaddled you, leaned you into my lips

and then took you away

for thirteen hours

and by then a cuff and a little ruff of gauze

taped to your little wrist.

and a thin, capped, i.v. tube

.

when you're still

when you’re still

IX.

mystery is the complexion

of a February spruce rationing sun  

in her numb gully of winter.

it is a sluggish impulse

to jump

into a breached luminosity, of waiting

to taste the salt, instant as struck flint,

in the split bruised lip i grind and dig

between my teeth. i dig and grind, dig

with the knob

of a lost grave-spade and spread

the debris on the threshing floor

and grind and pulverize

and beg

not to fade away

because I know it’s what gets me

from there

to you if I can just

hang

on

quiet grind

(moon ii)

maybe your labor toward
and into light

is so routine

its lost its ability

to be a witness

to everyone

except lovers, and

the mad,

and

mothers,

or poets who,

like li po

go into his boat

on the water

and mistake

your wavy light

for a road

and stepped onto you.

and are lost.

VIII.

it's a labor slow

a labor deliberate—

and you and me.

and once, after the too long drive

to the hospital

I’d be admitted no wider

than one centimeter.

but now they know that slow,

slow water of your world

drips out into mine…

we’d be monitored,

you’d be echoed,

and the i.v. of pitocin

coaxed you slowly.

and we’d walk and we’d sit,

we’d rest and we’d walk  and we’d sit

as though we were waiting

for news after a cave collapse

we waited

thirty hours like this

and then an epidural.

and even more hours...

early pregnant not knowing

(moon)

 in six days

you’ll be round

enough, ripe enough

to eat

.

IV.

Early March:

this blanket is a grizzled band-aid.

it's every 2:30 morning 

sitting in the glossed enamel

cool latex moon 

at the cramped desk

my great grandfather made

out of a three quarter bed

to worry words:   

mother, ,,,,,, lover, mother, warrior-mother, mystic-mother,

prophet-moth, murderer-other her hem rote...

book up book dust—

and I will lose:  

words, what I need

to get ready for:  

(when I was five

night was a musty wool army

blanket.  always awake early, I stayed

the dark by hearing

my mother make her tea

alone downstairs.  The tink of the spoon: 

two sugars and a white stream

evaporated milk. 

I didn’t move until I heard her open

the kitchen door, shut it behind her, one of six

baskets of sorted wet whites

or colors wet and starting to freeze at her hip.

Early the Nausea

Early the Nausea

VI.

Who makes the Moth

Mother?

Other?  Three or Thee

(we add an extra e—

Her own Om?

Roe?  Home?

a hem

a tree

that tore the tether,

finally,

free?

Into a Sea Change

Into a Sea

                                    Change

V.

And now

I am mornings of boiled seas and stones

I am polished salt

and water I am dissolved

rock

bottled

in my own brine I am

shelved in the dark  

nine months behind you.

The Meaning of Memory

the meaning of memory:  

II                       

it was night

                        a wednesday night

                             nearing toward eight o’clock

                                       

when his life began to go out…

this, this         your 

life began

to come in

III.

the Bardo is:

forty nine days for the soul

to give in to the sound

of a mother keening her letting go

the hallway isle—

                        how, I think of Justin, under such staggering weight

                        your sudden letting go—

                        I want to believe this: and so I do:

                       

                                    you saw the glow that we were

                        and came to be among us.