I have the makings of an excellent Catholic, I think, in spite of everything, because my disposition leads me to the most excessive forms of adoration. I am particularly drawn to that which does not necessarily exist.
If I could make one wish, I’d wish for this.
I can scarcely believe what lives inside me — if only for this one moment. I look out at the transfigured universe.
My heart fills the world like Magritte’s rose.
Helen wants to buy tiny lamb’s-wool booties, little hats, baby buntings, everything she sees — but I say we must wait, not yet. As if one could stave off heartbreak by the refusal of baby booties. The next few months will be the hardest. Still, at the center I feel an extraordinary calm. A feeling that has eluded me my whole life until now. I hold the entire body of a lamb in my arms. I pray: Sheep may safely graze.
I cannot rouse myself. Cannot even imagine getting up. How to get to school? The world going on out there, I suppose. This fatigue like no other. This distance. How small the rest of the world from here. How far off. Never felt such fatigue, such silence, such peace —
Compelled as I am, pulled down an allée, a line of trees, a line of plain trees, France? Into an overwhelming calm and strangeness.
Sleep now for this insomniac.
Odd, as if one’s whole life were being rocked.
And this I think is what dying must be like. Everything small as if seen from a great distance. The fierce attachments to this world begin to loosen. I give up a little. Strangely, without even trying. Good-bye. And if this is what dying is…the world a tender place — I look back on it with fondness. As it disappears, losing its hold on me, I realize I have really very few regrets. In fact none come readily to mind — that I did not have more time to write, yes, but nothing else, nothing enormous. I think I must be a very lucky person that this be so. This letting go is a gorgeous thing. The ground beneath my feet gives way to something quite else. And I glimpse for a moment — for one moment it opens in me, but then passes — only intimations, but intimations nonetheless of what seems to be eternity.
Two three-hour workshops in the same day, and I am exhausted.
Reading an undergraduate paper aloud in class we come to the line, “Walter’s long knife slices the duck again and again, crispy skin crinkling itself at the edge of the plate with each smooth cut.”
We are here to comment on the paper. But I am beast. Like my cat, Fauve, focused on that one thing — that morsel that might drop. Cannot recall such hunger. And rarely such strange single-mindedness. Cannot pry my mind from the crispy skin. Cannot think. In the purity of this hunger zone, where I collapse, defenseless. Feed me. Cover me. Put me to sleep. I am beast. I look up at the class, speechless.
My mane grows wild and I stare. Into space forever. Lion haired. My nails grow strong and sharp. The eye searching the horizon line. Feed me, warm me, put me to bed. Shred clothing, paper. Build me a fire. Dark flame —
Small flame. Like the heart clinging. Tenacity. I pray for you. Ferocity. I am over forty. That you might hold.
I am all beauty. All beast. Something so startling. Like Rilke’s panther. I am all want, hope, desire, fear.
In the book the enormity, the serenity, the perfection of the egg. The supreme solitude of the egg…
A shining sperm breaks through. The sperm nucleus and the egg nucleus lie side by side and their content is combined.
Large and luminous and perfectly still. Frantic motion just outside her. Perfectly round and lit from within. Shimmering. Transparent.
Creation’s momentous drama: “That moment, when the two nuclei form and the now fertilized egg divides in two, is the beginning of the life of the new individual. This is zero hour of Day One.”
On that plane. All altitude, velocity, the collapsing past, the future right there, next to me. He is speaking to me. I am all lucidity, and in an instant I reach out. Light bounces wildly in the cabin. The blur of voice and hand — speed, accuracy, certitude, at these heights. What were our choices? A star is slung over our heads and the earth is turning at an incredible speed, and we are both dizzy with so many things — the real world tiny, the world beneath dissolving. Maybe I am crazy. This is the moment; I am quite sure. No, maybe not. I am dying in the instant I turn away from it — and so I turn back. We are alive. Before my eyes a rose, a wing, a star. That one held note. My life a vulnerable, fragile, fleeting thing. Liquid and urgent. Stars contained in a bowl. I glitter. He lifts his hand to the light. All is movement and the movement is unspeakably beautiful. We take flight. Maybe we could get together some other time. I was the one who said, tonight. I took his hand. And we descend. Curve of the land. All that was, or is, or will ever be possible, in this one moment. Afterwards an incredible calm.
The drift of you and stars in the dark. Through the lily- or trumpet-shaped fallopian tubes, past the uterus and into the womb — you are already beautiful. Free floating. Free.
That silent drift — a lovely music.
The cells multiply, the code is passed, and she is made. When the four-day-old cell cluster arrives in the womb, it is made up of three dozen cells. Closely packed together, they are known as morula — from the Latin for mulberry.
My beautiful mulberry girl.
“A pale-lavender spongy surface, and on it a tiny blister surrounded by crimson. The crimson wreath is the slight wound caused by the invasion into the maternal tissues.”
Oh, baby-to-be in your capsule of blood.
The cluster of follicle cells around the ovum is a beautiful radiant wreath and so it is called the corona radiata.
The three dozen cells of the mulberry are already differentiated. One layer will produce the nervous system, one layer the digestive, and the third the skeleton, heart, blood vessels, muscles. It nests finally, comes to rest, nourished by my blood.
Then two cells, four, six, eight. The structural code in place.
Dear creature. Dear miracle. Made in motion, under the stars. And you take your first shape. Two cells, four. Now legs. Heart.
To conception I brought the same things I bring to my writing: focus, faith, will, intuition, license, rigor, and recklessness. A position of mind that allows, within a structure of my own making, for the accidental, the unexpected, the contingent. To hold one’s mind and body and spirit at exactly the right angle — ready for whatever will happen. Taking full advantage of a moment should it, no matter how fleetingly, present itself. Once again my writing has taught me how to live.
By the twenty-first day that black dot is a retina. The foot like a fan. I cannot imagine anything more lovely. Already the whole embryo is formed. “It is the size of half a pea, fragile as jelly and almost without substance.” I tremble to read this. The heart beating by the twenty-fifth day — it is a large bulge. This heart, dear God, in proportion to the size of the body, is nine times as large as the adult heart. I read now all that has already transpired without me, it seems.