little scar

XXIV

one:

I like that thought: that the dark knows

how tall we are, how small we are,

if we shake in it or if we become  in it.

We are marked here, aren’t we?  And

whatever happens there, the scars are the echo

of our departure, a long, long hum, pulse.

I remember the dog that bit me.  Alone, this

poor mutt had likely been beaten

before he came to be tied, houseless,

to our tree.  I saw the black-veined meat

of his gums, as if his opening jaw were on

slow cinema—before he sunk his teeth in my left

cheek, three inches from my eye. 

I was four.  My daughter’s age now.

A piece of him is still there, resting

on my jaw-bone, or in the ball

and socket of my jaw, slightly out of grind.

It sets me—this jaw, shaped by a little dog.

Later I would defend him—he wasn’t provoked,

he was just hungry.  Lonely.  Sad.  When

my father shot him, I wonder if his expression

was relief.  Standing there then, face to mouth

with my dog, was/is my first memory of dark-

ness and how much of it I could stand in

without crying out, dog, me, hanging on.

Yes, just the dog and me.  A hot August day…

somewhere, miles away, my father was cutting

hay.  Drinking beer.  That tractor, moving

in low groans, is like the dog, after I’m able

to pull away, who leaps one more time.  By then,

I’m on my face in the blurry grasses

and he reaches the end of his chain.  It vibrates

and sings.  Even today, thirty six years later,

when I hear a chain gone on force to its end, I smell

that dog, our spit and blood, the piles of his shit I fell in

getting away, the scar of our agreement left

and now a low stitched moon, or part of one…

two:

Baby, you will have a scar.  They’ll cut a thin line

of skin across  your abdomen, pull the flesh

open to peer at what’s not working in your dark.

But that will be later.  After ten days of surveillance

and tinctures of time, you were eating.

you were passing water.  And solids.

And they let you come home.  We had carried

your coming home clothes with us everywhere.

Soft, off-white fleece.  You looked like

a pillow I could lay my head down on, finally,

and sleep.  And pray, maybe, to some quiet god,

a gratitude, and to beg

for sufficient breasts

to feed your days and nights with the safety

of a warm fully belly.

 

Retro/In(tro)-

spection

 

inchmeal (adv)

              by inches, inch by inch, by small portions, little by little.

inanition, (n)

              the action or process of emptying; the condition of being

              empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want

              or insufficiency of nourishment

 

Days and days before my labor was to be made its own open

and shut case feeble cracks seemed somewhere inside of me,  

 

somewhere climbing beside the baby, and were letting clean

amniotics out through to the open world.  Slow motion drain,

 

a sudden crush of pain and the substance was on my thigh

and busy, and ashamed, I’d mistaken it for pee.  I was mad

 

at myself for not keeping it in, keeping it clean, the fault obviously,

OBVIOUSLY! mine.  The baby seemed peaceful in this

 

dwindling sea, tight swaddle that he was.  Imagine the scent

of the sea was between my legs, a tide finding the full bowl

 

of the cove of my pelvis and pressure cracking what all it would. 

And the illuminating moon was a tired eye, milky with clouds,

 

closing the shoals, slowing the motor, bow nudging

the summits of the rocks, rudder coming undone, invisible,

 

underneath it all  

xy

XY

you were born red faced and already turning  (lifted,
true, through the unzipped uterus) and who knew

you were turning that sort of blue though only on the inside
where nobody could see you (you were so

quiet being newly alive at least on the outside) who knew
or wanted to that you were dying in there dying

almost and as as as soon as you began

to swallow: swallow air swallow milk swallow

anesthesia all of every nothing that was a you and me

was a we recovering: what the nurse counting, naming tools
so she didn't stitch them in

reminded me that they say how lust needs to become
lusty it needs to become

hunger when lungs loco-
mote with flames the first burn an untinctured

Pentecost that all babies who live past being blue need
to survive, especially 

even on the inside (you did it you did but it took you

weeks of breathing and heart beating and not

eating and maybe even to make up your mind to make it
to surrender even more than most only those few days old:

to wriggle shhhh beneath the scalpel Peter Rabbit

and the precision of a pediatric surgeon and her incision

exposing your blue compacted glacier of a colon, all those micro
organisms dying into the trap of ultramarine, a pressure only

Vermeer perfected and died knowing and you made
generously inside of you so generously inside of you.

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.