Accident: 10 Our Father’s, 10 Hail Mary’s, 3 Glory Be’s.
The lacerated Mexican saint
she watched other people’s children. Because it was not to be.
Pray for us sinners.
The useless petitions
3 Not to Be’s
black umbilicus
paint:
an umbilical chord emerges from a placenta — the large red vein. Good-bye.
Finally my first visit to the doctor. Lisa Rehrer, the one we had chosen, has been sick, and so we had to reschedule a few times. She’s nice, about my age. She wondered just how many babies I might be carrying as we got ready for the sonogram. Not funny. It seems that after forty the eggs start hurling themselves out two, three at a time sometimes — and so there is the possibility of more than one baby. No, not funny in the least. I feel I am ready for about anything — but not twins, let alone triplets. Good God! Mercifully I never took fertility drugs. That’s one hopeful thing.
It is confirmed, one very great baby is in there! I can’t describe the feeling. To see, to hear it. No words come close. The elevator on the way down from the doctor’s office gets stuck and so all tears of joy must be postponed. Helen’s gone ahead to get the car. It is me and a man who speaks only — it’s not Spanish, so it must be Portuguese — and I am suddenly very, very panicky and claustrophobic. I am my own nest of Russian dolls in this box. These rooms within rooms making me dizzy. But it is the man who actually looks woozy. Are you sick, I ask him, pausing between my frantic attempts to reach someone on the elevator telephone. He indicates his head. Help! I feel like Lucy Ricardo.
Days have passed without a single word written here. I have been stunned into speechlessness. For once, no words come. Saw the little being and it has a heart beat, the baby on a TV screen. Alive there. Most extraordinary sight. Swimming. Doing little somersaults. I study the picture books now obsessively.
You fit into a goose egg now.
Songs without words.
You weigh only an ounce. But by the end of the third month you will be able to kick your legs, turn your feet, curl and fan your toes, bend your wrist, turn your head, squint, frown, open your mouth, pout.
Nothing but babies everywhere I look. These babies seek me out, speak to me. Their tiny hands, the dark O of their mouths — that small intake of sweet air. Stars in their hands, sparkly eyes. The chubby feet. Everywhere I turn. I try not to see this yet — or have my heart so full. Still…
Day after day of weeping now. This lucky, lucky life.
Do a little fan dance for me when you can.
I am grateful to have Gale, my assistant director. Teaching two classes and directing the program while I can hardly keep my eyes open would not be remotely possible without him. He does not know the news yet — I am waiting until after the amniocentesis — but still he instinctively comes to my rescue; he is always there by my side, helping with the next, and then the next, crisis. I realize I will be pregnant the entire school year.
The back and forth from Providence to New York all exhausting. Trying to read student papers on the train as much as possible. I keep drifting off. Revery of the very late fall — one of my favorite seasons. A beautiful, desolate time.
I am a good teacher because I refuse to condescend to my students, and because I listen to them and respect the work they are doing, and the terms they have set for it. I do not prejudge it. And I do not have preconceptions. In fact this is what keeps me interested in student work. I do not ask them questions to which I already know the answers. I do not want to make them over in my own image. I cannot bear the pathetic ego most writing teachers routinely assert. I only ask my students questions, and this often exasperates them, but there is no other way I can teach in good conscience. I am not a tyrant, I am not a bully, I am always kind. In an uncharacteristic moment of dismay once I told an undergraduate class that I was not going to spend more time critiquing their papers than they spent writing them. I will not be taken advantage of. I give them a lot of room in which to work. Am I too lenient? Am I too disengaged? I think not. I am not a taskmaster. Only when I sit down to write myself am I completely relentless: you can do better than this. But not with my students. If they do not become writers it is really quite all right with me. I cannot give them the need to write if they do not have it. Some of my Brown graduate students are so good that I consider it my job mainly to stay out of their way. I like teaching but am drained by the part of the brain it uses up. It is the same part required to write. It is, I assume, the same part it takes to raise a child creatively. If I had nine lives, teaching is what I would do with one of them. As it is I have only one.
Dreamt last night I was a belly dancer. On a table at The Magic Carpet.
In the twelfth week motion becomes specialized and graceful.
I am on my way to California. It is Helen’s birthday. For once she got to choose her own birthday presents because I just couldn’t traipse around town the way I ordinarily like to — I am just too sleepy. I didn’t even wrap them this year. She’s gotten me one of those suitcases you pull along, because she doesn’t want me lifting anything. I do not have a phone in Providence, and she insists I get a cell phone, which she gives me with the suitcase. What if there is an emergency? I smile. My Buddha spirit is beginning to wear on her nerves: there will be no emergencies, I say serenely.
Babies in the air. Little diapered babies at 35,000 feet running down the aisles. Babies on those little collapsible changing tables. Babies in every lap. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Today is Helen’s birthday. I took her to the restaurant Provence for lunch before I got on the plane.
But my real gift to her of course: a baby in the air.
We are flying as the finishing touches are applied. The nail beds form on the fingertips. The eyes move toward the bridge of the nose. The eyelids close over the eyes by the ninth week and temporarily seal them like a kitten’s. They will remain closed now until the sixth month. You travel in darkness for now, little one. I’m right here.
Imagined one. Prepared-for one. Loved so thoroughly in advance.
Flung across time zones, gluttonous for more hours, I sleep the sleep of the dead all day, all night it seems, wake only to do my readings.
Days of rain. The Californians do not approve of rain. I’d forgotten. It’s very beautiful here. I fall back to sleep.
Someone says the writer Kathy Acker is dead, and I push through fog toward the terrible news. I must be dreaming.
She has closed her eyes. They will remain closed to the sixth month. The vocal cords are complete, but in the absence of air they cannot produce sound.
That I should have been able, in this state, to protect Kathy Acker, drawn her into this bubble. That I could not do this, or any other thing — a sorrow, a reminder.
Extravagance of the fruits and flowers here!