Walking Web

I am caught          like a fly            in a web
though I am moving and have broken it

From twigs         and branches          that string it
blue, cold, skyward and tether its ends to the hot center

I am carrying          it with me         over shoulders
and neck like a noose or long pendant, I’ll wear it forever

Sometimes          it glistens          on my skin
sometimes I scratch and pull at infinite fragments

Each bit falls         away, nothing          visible remains
but still I am traced by silk and bound by its feeling on my skin

Light, down         to nearly nothing          you can’t see
that it’s there in my hair or on my face, under finger nails.

Degenerate

Broken by a fall out of bed
the pain didn’t wake me but the noise
lack of crack, a slow rumble
flipped me sideways like thunder
hitting my eardrums from inside
and hammering dully on my brain
as with elbows that don’t relent
self-defensive and close to the danger
the pain became the noise
filled with fragments of femur
my leg was red and liquid fire
They’d told me the bones would start breaking
that red and white would disintegrate
like sands from different deserts
and yes those sands were rubbing and mixing
and creating a frenzied whir
humming electric as I lay on the planks
later my collarbone in the dressing room
and all the toes while sitting perfectly still
my biggest bone had broken
now I would wait for help
and then wait for breaking

I don't usually write things quite like this...

...but I am today.  Because today Eleanor and Josephine got a new room.  As their bodies expand, so do their things.  Bigger beds.  More books.  Bigger, bouncier, less fragile bodies, means less room for sentimental things.  So now there is a big peach chest emblazoned with S floating around the house.  It squats in my room.  In the living room.  In the girls' room.  It is in danger, in a sense.  Constant ever present danger that it will be opened.  I will take a shower, and come out, dry off, find its contents scattered.  Rose petals, pictures frames, book pages.  I am delaying making a decision, because I know her chest will end up in some closet.  For the safe keeping I never meant to do.  In the meantime, I've been digging through it.  This is something I don't do.  The wound picking I used to love that no longer feels good.  Not that I don't miss it. 

So much has changed since I folded her Christmas sleepers and ran my palms over the yellow striped bits of cloth.  I cried, but I smiled.  I even laughed.  I laughed when I saw the rip in the back of that Christmas sleeper.  Made by our dog.  Who let me cry on his scrawny shoulder.  And later bit Eleanor.  And was put down.  When I was hugely pregnant with Josephine.  That's a story that is anything but funny.  I guess.  But what a life.  That just keeps moving and changing.  And, with time, even the shortest lives take on new significances.  And I laugh because I know new, more important things all the time. 

"Mom, are you a tiny bit sad about Sophie?"  I tell her I'm very sad about Sophie.  "But you're a lot happy about us?"  I tell them that I am--that they are the absolute lights of my life.  Those times make my heart swell.  I am teaching them something about joy and sadness.  And deep emotion.  But my heart also beats for the times I hear Sophie as part of their daily vocabulary.  "Josephine, GET OUT OF MY ROOM!  I want to be alone.  GO GET A SNACK!  GO THINK ABOUT SOPHIE!  GO MARRY A PRINCESS!" 

A few of the things I saw in the chest: 

A Gators uniform.

A Spalding shirt.

A pink hooded towel signed with curly letters written in sharpee.

A quilt from the Atlanta gift show.

A book called "When Sophie Gets Angry" from Barnes and Noble in Bowie.  (Which now makes me laugh because it makes me think about Sophie as a scary angry haunting ghost.  And that's nothing like anything I believe about her.  And it's absurdly funny.)

A book called "My Friend Gorilla" which really does break my heart a little.  Too much to read.

A picture of her that I scanned and printed and tried to pretty up and make presentable.  So I could frame it in my house.  And, fuck, it hurts that she died.  That her skin was that red in places.  But breathe.  Remember that documentary about the moment of death, in which they say bleeding to death is like slowly slipping away.  There.  That hurts a little less.

A slip from the florist, regarding a tree, that later died.

Cards.  Pinks and greens.  Brights and pastels.  Congratulations!  Dated from my shower. 

Cards.  Subtle colors.  Sensitive fonts.  Kind words.  From people I talk to daily still.  From family and from friends.  From people who still remember, and people who've moved on.  From people who've lost their own babies.  From people with whom I'm no longer friendly.  From people I love.  From the Dance Party.  From the giver of the red rocking chair and the eclipse gazer, who've since both died.  The world just keeps changing.  Its makeup constantly shifting, as my sadness really does drift away to make room for my joy, and the joy and the sadness of others.

A box of crayons.  And I gave it to the girls.  I just gave it to them.  For coloring, paper stripping, breaking, melting, and throwing away.  Just for living.

I look at and finger these soft things.  They smell old now.  And they strum new chords.  Or maybe the guitar is tuned to a new key.  Or harmonies layer the sadness with joy.  They don't hurt like they used to.  What hurts is the way they make me laugh, and how the smiles come easier than the tears.  But even that hurt feels so fucking good. 

I'm not some great person.  Changed.  Or calm.  Or taking things in stride.  I'm not more brilliant.  Or more patient (god, no).  But I can look at these things that felt like a thousand knives twisting, and see a story that unfolds.  That keeps unfolding.  Doubling over, reaching into and out of me, in ways I never dreamed.

The Common Cold

The sun still comes up
and that’s a surprise each morning,
but it comes up gray now.
Or not quite gray, but that liquid color
that mist makes when it’s part of the sky
and when it stays.
It’s streaked with something like yellow
that teases like daffodils
on something I’ve heard was called
                       e-a-s-t-e-r.

But it’s just the gray that stays,
and nothing smells as lemon
as the taste s-u-n left on my lips.
The gray lives here now,
hovering just below my mother’s ears
and chin and right above her neck.
The fog like a slice
like a quarter moon
slits her throat,
clean and round and full and smooth.
                                At least we would see red again.

But she is all body now,
head bobbing intermittently
out of the shadows to drop
her skull into her bony hands
or to kiss and breathe where my bicep
still feels like child flesh.

So this is the apocalypse.

Next year—if we make it that long—
if I am luckier than the neighbor
                                     I will grow taller.

And the next year I will stretch to learn
that gray world my mother knows.
Even now, if I wake up at that name-damned
wet time between night and morning
I can stand on my toes,
and press the dirt
and lengthen my neck,
grown thinner each day,
and stick my nose in the fog.
Nevermind I can’t breathe for shit—
as people used to say
about things like sinus infections
and “the common cold.”

The cans ran out last summer.
Officially.
They said we were a dry street,
this fall.
But that wasn’t so bad.
We found things here and there
that mimicked popcorn and artichokes.
That required scraping and taking chances,
but summer was hot
and no one felt hungry.
At least we never mentioned
it with our mouths.
And autumn just ran on adrenaline
and hopes of fading
and not fading.

But winter was hard. 
So fucking hard.
No one cares that we say that now.
Maybe it’s always been that way,
when kids, all long legs
and lank hair
slink behind old
sinking wooden houses
and say things like “fucking.”
                               But we say it now.

I say it when I go to bed,
say it under my breath when waking.
This morning, I took that
talk of fucking and went to
where the garden used to be.
I feel like a child
and I stop saying it.

I drop to my knees,
and the earth is cool.
And I stick my fingers in it.
No one notices dirty nails.
They won’t know I’ve been here
if I level it later.
They are all up there
above fog anyway.

And it feels like night.
Cool and fresh
after hot days
I hardly remember.
And I think of those orbs
of white—fertilizer.
And the days when green
came out of brown.
And the feeling of soil
that was really moist.
Almost like soup—mud.
And how that made living things.
And how plants need
rain and sun like tit for tat.
And how it feels to bake
and then grow damp again.
                                 Then bake.

It’s cool in the dirt,
and the ground is smooth.
We’ve made sure of that.
We want to know what grows.
If anything changes at all.
If anything comes up this year.

This dry, dry fucking year.
                   We watch and wait
                                     for the ground to change.

A Pile of Blankets

A pile of blankets,
quilts all heaped together in my daughters' favorite colors.
I see them on their beds when they are playing in the yard.
I miss their small bodies suddenly, and their smells.
I long to see their belly buttons, and put my face in their warm necks.
But I don't want the chaos,
the blankets will have to be enough, a vessel for heat and odors,
I run my hands along the edges and over the folds, and inside them.
I expect their hotness and respiration to translate,
But the spaces of the blanket, all the spaces, are cold on my fingertips.
The girls are just outside.

Precious things.

Precious is small.
Like something that can be held in one hand.
Or two hands cupped together,
one hanging back, behind,
holding
the
hand
holding the baby bird.
When the bird is precious
it is plump and blue
all swollen breast and
fluorescent orange beak. 
It does not have bugging eyes
or strangled wings
and when it cries for food
crushed up worms are
always waiting
in a neighboring hand
(its pair waiting to stroke beneath the blue chin)
and the bird can be sated.
Precious things
hunger
like
other
things,
but they are too easily satiable.
They cry out in pain, but submit to
bandages and healing.
The are held and never take off in angry flight,
until they do.

Not a poem, just a thought.

Today I was going pee. 
On my own toilet. 
At home. 
Bill had just gotten new toilet paper. 
It was "angel soft."
Five years ago that would have hurt.
I would have been mad.
But I put it on the roll.
I went to grab some.
The pattern on the white tissue was butterflies.
Five years ago I would have sworn.
It would have hurt like being stabbed.
Anyone who would buy that, fuck them.
You knew I might come over.
Fuck you.
My baby died.
You know that symbol is butterflies.
You know I reluctantly put them on her walls.
You know I got into that.
That's just how it felt.
Worse than being stabbed now that I write it down.
But not today.
Today I saw the butterflies.
And I remembered.
And I had a secret.
And for a split second it was nice.
It was our second.
And I've felt that way in other bathrooms.
That special moment.
It's still a recollection of my baby.
I rustle the tissue with my thumb and fore finger.
It is soft and perfumed and powdered.
(Nevermind the wiping with it.)
Whether you know it or not.
Thanks for buying that tissue.
Thanks for never changing.
Thanks for believing I'd come back.
But better.