Reflections

I've been spending some time lately going through an impressive compendium of pregnancy writing, most of which has never seen the light of day.

Pregnancy: an era spent filling the gorge between one life and the next with so many words, waxing, speculating. Buoyed by the abstract etching of poetry. Sifting through it is not unlike going through the baby's clothes, one drawer at a time, once she's grown.

Unbelievable she ever fit into this.

The hindsight between now—mother of a 17-month old—and then—months from yet becoming someone's mama, months from giving birth, feels like light-years in distance. Reading a diary from adolescence would feel as far away.

So, I'd like to resurrect some of those pregnancy-pieces in the well-nested context of this very blog. You will see them here and there as a moment when the dinner-conversation turns to reflection before it returns back to talk of buttering the bread.

Here is a poem written within a few weeks of finding out I was pregnant:

Growing Quartz.

This body is going through major renovations.

Walls are being knocked out from inside

and no holler of Timber!

Carpet is removed, torn from roots like deep exfoliation.

Tiny ink blotches of mold by windows and the tub are scrubbed with fever—

had never been noticed before.

Viscera is moved from corner to corner

like furniture

like legs crossed and uncrossing

desperate for the best arrangement, the best lap, for a baby.

Windows are propped open to the steely air,

the smell of wood burning from neighboring chimneys.

In the midst of the construction, the noise, the fog,

a Room in the far corner is decanted, chaperoned

for the new Tenant to do with what she pleases.

(What, pray tell, WILL she please? If she is even accurate, that is.)

As the excavations continue and everything finds its rightful place

like grandma’s spoons on the wall

her Santas on the shelves

baby grows from comma to blueberry to raspberry to medium-sized olive

like a series of Russian Dolls sewn under my skin.

The bellycavern holds court

with the tenacity

of an air pocket beneath the weight of a rock mountain.

Rewarded for its persistence in the refusal to collapse

with prosperous crystal vegetation.

Give me quartz!

Give me amethyst!

One is reminded of the magic hatched

from the conviction

to protect

a place for something to grow.

Mar 14, 2009. (9 weeks.)