Overcoming

Overcoming 

For Anna Spafford

Psalm 22: 14-15 (KJV)

I am poured out like water, and

all my bones are out of joint: my

heart is like wax; it is melted in the

midst of my bowels.

My strength is dried up like a

potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to

my jaws; and thou has brought me

into the dust of death.

XX.

Anna, it’s you I need to write to,

your hymns I need to hear,

their angry awe you must've

hummed and sung with—you

who floated exposed, sea assailed

who stare

at a land or sea, the chance

accidents and curt victories—

like a Magdalena in the crowd

who watched, impotent beneath the feet

of Jesus, soldiers roll cubes

of bone for his robe.

And who, knowing Jesus,

let that bolt of cloth, the seamless

scarlet gauze become his 

crepe paper eclipse.

I don’t know if you wrote hyms,

Anna.  But I want the clenched

jaw before yous sang one, I want that

film of fog scum on of your eyes to be mine

‘saved alone’ you said in the telegram.

No. No I don’t.  I don’t want

to look out of your eyes.  Or be

your eyes.  Being your eyes

would mean being your raw

and bitten hand losing

the grip on the white shift

of your infant daughter

not once or twice but

more than…the cold slow gel

of all four of your daughters

dropping through the three miles

to finally achieve something solid.

Anna, my son’s been put in a rocking

bed in this hospital.  A boat’s sway,

it pitches him back and forth

through the day, through the night,

when he doesn’t cry.

It’s been a week now, in beds

like these, or soft constant swings,

and he's still not allowed

to eat.  They still don’t know what is wrong.

Anna, you know what it's like

on the bottom of life-boats,

their false ribs of cutting

into your thick-with-shock limbs.

If you had had the strength

would you have hurled yourself

over the edge to sink to your four 

lost daughters, a sober La Lloronna?

Didn't you want to drown there

with them in that water?   How is it

you didn't die?  Was it some compulsion

kept you rescued, transferred

from boat to boat to land to boat

to land to boat again.  Eventually,

after you settle in Israel, and after 

another son with the same name 

as your first son dies from scarlet fever, 

your husband’s hymn

becomes famous.  It’s still sung today.

I bet most people don’t even know

what they have in their mouths.  

But you do: brine and dust, uttering:

Saved alone, what shall I do.

Tincture of Time.

Tincture of Time.

Finally, on day ten, they may
let you have a little of my milk.

Since birth, your hollow empty belly.  

Your mew for food.  Every two hours

and only when you slept, I’d leave you

for the lactation room, The Barn I called it,

and sit in one of the three chairs

behind the amber privacy drapes, hook myself up—

the stable whisper of the machine seemed

an idling car engine after it was started

in the cold, and I remember the old Ford

my father used to drive,

its massive hood.  The four-blade

fan, and the small spaces our cats would crawl into

to get warm in the winter time.

I remember how we all stood around

when our favorite outside

cat was caught there after my father had started

the car one late January afternoon.  Her scream. 

The clean separation of her upper half

and her lower half.

The blood on the snow.  Her pink belly  mauled

raw by her new babies, the fur licked

clean. 

She was still alive.  There were no gun-shots.

Only the rifle butt

and the sigh of the bones in her neck.

I’d swear today they sighed,

they didn’t break at all.

A final, grateful exhale.  And that new still blind

litter of eight was a warm tight ball in the hay in the shed

behind us.  I rocked back and forth then, the way

I rock back and forth how, I look and look away

because it’s cold in this barn and the cup

doesn’t fit.  And that mother cat, gone for years,

who’d crawled away from her babies, seduced

by that warm car engine, getting a moment

away curls up in my lap and purrs.

Sitting here, often alone, but sometimes

with other pumping mothers, my milk won’t

let down.  I glare at the breast pump

cups of one mother, who can barely

unhook one boob in time to catch

the thin steady string of white thin glory.  I want

to proposition her.  Hire her cheap.  Or pat her

down, see what’s she’s hiding. 

What are you, a wet-nurse? I want to say.

But there’s some etiquette here. 

There’s that ad I’d bought my own pump under: 

·         increase your breast size and stimulate at the same time

·         fit the cup over the breast, and start pumping until you are satisfied

·         Requires 'Size Matters' hand pump, sold separately

It’s a flat lie.  Pump until you’re satisfied.  Right.

I pump until I’m bloody.  Maybe an ounce. 

We barely talk, we who are on the precipice

of grief.  Our duty to our sick sons secrets

us and  when our session, here in this stall is done,

or I can’t pull and push another minute,

after we’ve screwed and labeled the lids, soaped

our chapped areolas, we’re bound again

to the rocking chair.  One woman tells me

this is her favorite room in the whole hospital.

She’s the mega pumper, whose son,

a little bittern of a thing, was born

at 27 weeks.  “It’s quiet in here.

No alarms.  A gentle light.  Some shadow.

It smells real.”  She’s right.  The lights

never go out in the NICU.  The alarms never shut off. 

In here the fragrance is:

                castile, refrigerator motor,

                warm hands.

Here, in this oasis—here we can rest, be women

mending, women putting themselves back

together.  After she packs up and cleans and leaves

I size her up like I always do, like every woman

sizes up every other woman and then

hate themselves for doing it.  We’re no better than the lewd boys

in the locker room.  And we’ll never measure up.

Maybe she’s got another baby.

Maybe she’s getting laid.

Maybe…

I got nothing.  Until it’s a real mouth instead of

this prosthetic suck I’ve got absolutely nothing.

Not until they tell me, after I cap and rinse and clean

for ten days in a row they’ll consider sending you home.

But you’ll have to eat for twenty four hours

without spitting up.  I’m not sure you can.  But I do feel

that heavy swell for the first time

since you were born…a mango going ripe on the tree,

and the cat jumps off my lap, curls around the rocking chair

leg and walks off, casual as a dream about heat,

about going out in snow and returning to feed

the suckling swaddled babies.