Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
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Comments
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She pout me in her slippers!
Sylvia did a re-living of this!
The choicest memories from a chaotic wait for a child's churn through the curtains of involvement in the eon of slapping like a dusty rug coming with a termed womb shed "bald cry." It became linear with lungs.
Maybe with with the vestige of evening 1st stage labor she certified a title of a poem for a baby who might have been a healthy 8 pounds thus "Love set you going like a fat gold watch."
Lines 4-6 are are the zany daze one is introduced to with the artfulness a 18 hour snoozer and calmed "new staue" of the newly "In a drafty museum, your nakedness."
Lines 7-9 are bristled with one's ability to be randombly picked up now out of the mothering defining scope, the uterus, for likeness to be made that yet is on its own quieter "Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow"
Though we have perils, Psalm 35:14 -- 'if my own mother did leave me'
and Proverbs 30:4 there's the clausality for our all calling reinforced by Matthew 6:9 for what would mean deprivation if every repair.
Lines 10-12 is very moving now with ventilation :
"All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear."
11 was my favorite as the decorative sheets are now a diorama with what was mentioned above.
12 is a torment of the crib being as a seashell of separateness pretending almost.
13-15 gives the urgency from another room making a La Leche League lane to not be unanswered after one cry as there would be help after one call. This could have stayed parked by co-sleeping.
Tis mine not from infancy but urination pressed more so in pregnancy but I get out of bed with placenta doubles prepping backups and I hope not not to be coward that I can think of all of this in June!
15 is now infinitetely not remotely away but both reactively with alerts as the infant reaches "Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square"
16-19 is tucking lips so she lipped seeing "Whitens and swallows its dull stars." The galaxy pundit!
The vocals after float beautifully! -
Another favorite of mine. This poem took me back to the days after my daughter was just born and I would stumble through the house to her room, wearing my nightgown (cow-heavy - perfect description to capture the movement of a woman who just recently had a baby) to my daughter's room and she would open - clean as a cat's (that phrase is very clever.)
and "dull stars." made me think of the depression, the post partum blues, women often feel after having a child.
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Ava Noire June 11, 2005 "dull stars"
Perhaps at some level these "dull stars" are a comment on the strain a birth of a baby can put the starry-eyed approach to romance in a relationship under. Have a look at the poem "Child" which was written after the birth of her second child. Here the stars are not just "dull" but totally absent "dark, Ceiling without a star". Could these be comments on the dwindling of her marriage to Ted Hughes? Put "Tulips" between these two poems and the "whole" trio becomes so much more than "the sum of the parts".
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