April 27th poem

What It Is: Notes Toward Something Real

*

I wanted to write something real, but

I couldn’t remember the name of my goat

friend. The goat had had a rough birth,

leaned against my hip

in a muddy field in Vermont. 

I was newly pregnant, shiny and baffled. 

It will be ok, little goat mother,

us mothers said to each other

through our bodies. 

*

In my notes from writing group, Margaret's comment 

women’s bodies as failed performance of a cultural ideal

*

I was thinking about being pregnant in New York—

All that first trimester dizzy on the subway stairs, a descent,

uncertain destination.  Hormone fog, muddy mind.  Tadpole in mud.

 (I was really very dizzy and had no job.  I was

back together with my boyfriend.  I was

hot in the summer and had to only eat the right

amount of food, not too much and not too

little.  What am I doing. What mystery am I.) 

All through this haze, up to the quickening the glow

the metamorphosis the tearing the shit and fluids and

meeting another human so gloriously himself and

also a space and time traveler I could tell all through it,

but especially that first summer, the thought recurred: 

I would not require this of another woman, I would not

ask her to go through with this if she could not.

*

I’ve been wanting to record the dream I had that Charles Bronson electrified a crowd at a protest by singing a spiritual.  He looked completely different than I remembered, tall and lanky with a lean face like the red-haired Irish priest in the show about demons.  This Charles Bronson was flamboyantly gay, but my mind is thinking buoyant.  I realize then rigid machismo will crack open and make way.  That there is much else to electrify us.  Spaces to make for one another.  

*

What is it?  What?  What?

Making tea, my mind searches around

For what is different.  Then, a click:

Oh, I’m not in the young woman’s game

anymore.  I no longer require the approval

of others.  I step toward the kettle, just

as a metal colander falls from a stack

of dishes in the drying rack.  My thought

having jostled it.  Reach out

and catch it with one hand.