by Carole Maso
If I could scoop up that pale oval—which was your death, if I could—
And we float. Music of the spheres.
A cell of blood.
A white globule of milk.
Translucent amnion.
Perfection of the egg.
May we somehow stay safe.
Bodies moving through space, in a kind of flying, for a moment alight. Early fall, the stars aligned—to make this utter, utter perfection.
The baby cries without tears.
Emily cuts a piece of her baby blanket, which was once my sister’s blanket, her mother’s blanket, and gives it to baby Rose.
Everything seems elegiac. Emily and my mother in the kitchen making rose water. As if it is happening long ago in the past. They are both already long dead. I am watching their ghosts. And I? And Rose. We too are ghosts.
A flood of milk.
A bath of mother’s milk.
At sanity’s edge: drowning. Pull yourself together somehow, I think.
A great violence. The self being wrenched from the self. The part that broke away feeding on the other. No.
My breasts drowning the world—the baby in a cloud of white. Through her mother’s milk she sees—what does she see?
Images appear and fall away. This strange place. The planet casts an eerie glare.
Walk with me into this light.
I look up at the diffuse moon—that heavenly body, full, spilling milk.
A pearl string of milk—I can see each tiny, tiny bead, on a string—between my breast and her mouth. And she sleeps.
The world a completely visceral, sensual place to her—heat and cold, light and shadow, darkness, sound. She does not know yet where my body ends and hers begins. Such utter helplessness. Such strange trust—at the mercy of this world. She breathes air now, she wears little clothes. She experiences pain—bellyaches. I did not ever want you to feel distress. It was nice I think for you inside. I’m sorry for the harshness. There are times when you seem inconsolable and I ask myself now, what have I done?
The burden of the love for this little creature. The responsibility I feel not only for her life, but for her death. That she will one day have to die. And it will be because of me.
To try to dispel some of the death I reach for the only salvation I know. An étude I was working on a while back. Want, for sanity’s sake, to get out that piece about Elizabeth Bishop’s love affair with a pregnant woman and then new mother to see how it strikes me.
23 JUNE
For perhaps the tenth time, the tenth time, the tenth time.
How was I to know that I was always just a shell? It keeps returning. How was I to know that I carried an emptiness so large, so wide inside me, like a child? Would the night devoid of stars realize it? Would the day without light? And that after those nine precious months I would become a shell again—only now to be so aware of it. How to know that the world would leave me this way forever—bereft.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain flowering:
the nothing—, the
no one’s rose…
—Paul Celan, PSALM
A red mark called a stork’s bite on the back of her neck.
The baby blissed out on milk. In a bliss of milk. She makes the most beautiful, satisfied face.
No sleep. If I dose for a moment—we are at my parents’ house—and I wake to someone carrying the baby to me, I cannot believe it. It is like a dream, an enormous mistake of some sort. Whose baby is this, I wonder? Her little mouth already sucking as she nears me. What have I done?
The dark, the solitude, even with many people around, the quiet. Everything unreal and muffled. Too many people at once trying to take care of the baby. Too many phone calls. Work on our house still going on. The apartment too small—not an option. A trip to the city to see the pediatrician. I want to be left alone. I have never felt so strange and estranged. I weep all the time.
Oh girl among the roses, oh crush of doves,
oh fortress of fishes and rosebushes,
your soul is a bottle filled with thirsty salt
and your skin, a bell filled with grapes…
Come to my heart dressed in white, with a bouquet
of bloody roses and goblets of ashes,
come with an apple and a horse,
because there is a dark room there and a broken candle-holder,
and a dead dove, with a number.
—Pablo Neruda
Is it day, is it night? Is it hot, is it cold? No knowing and time slips.
In the shock, in the fog.
Nothing is recognizable. Nothing familiar to me. Everything strange. Still there is music. And people I think I must, under different circumstances, love.
What have I done?
Mother.
This was meant to be a happy book.
The baby’s ego disintegrates by the end of the day. Yes, I know the feeling.
The vertigo of being slammed back in an instant, not without violence, into one’s small, singular life. The grace withdrawn. I mourn it more than I can describe.
Slammed back into yourself. Without preparation. You thought you were prepared. That perhaps was the hardest part.
The true violence of childbirth is the violence of being thrown back into your one mortal body—alone again. The strangeness of having only one body to live in.
No one is there. That much I am quite sure of.
The “I” despite my efforts at memoir here, despite my efforts of assertion, dissolves. The pregnancy was something to give me the impression that I exist. But it has been taken away. These traces on the page. The evidence of that sweet deception.
Babies respond to music almost immediately, I read. Most music falls between 50 and 150 beats per minute—the range of the human heart. And so it consoles. And shall always console.
How she reaches out onto open air—empty space
And how all the old feelings come streaming back—fear, sadness, dread. Only after nine months of respite, they seem magnified.
3 JULY
Killed a beast in the middle of the night for Rose’s sake—a mosquito I think.
I have never killed anything in my life before.
The reaching toward a voice. The desperate attempt to locate, focus. I am grateful I do not remember being a baby. In many ways it seems a terrifying thing.
The days pass in a haze. One resembling the other—a little better, a little worse, that is all.
I pass her a perfect sphere of sleep, serenity, nourishment, pure health, and she passes the sleep back to me and we go on and on and on like this.
That mysterious milky globule.
Dissolving cell by cell by cell—a beautiful, irresolute music.
The eyes searching for the voice.
The hands searching. The look of yearning, want. I hold her to my heart. Try through tears to reassure her. But I cannot.
Rose, day twenty-four: nine pounds, thirteen ounces. Coco and Fauve are each seventeen pounds. Granted they are big.
Grow old with me, Helen, and I will support your head as you reach back into infancy. I want you to know this somehow—even though this is a period of terrible stress and hardship between us. And it seems right this minute as if I hate you. And I do. I do a little. Grow old.
Never leave my side.
Her tiny cup of unwept tears.
I give you this world.
Hymns to the Night.
A rose, asleep in the dark.
“And the ripe plum wears its dim attire.” Keats, I think.
Oh, I am a lactating fool. Cannot, no matter what I do, stop crying.
The enzyme of sleep I pass to you through this milk. The enzyme of sleep you release in me.
A baby in July… blueberries in the mother’s milk!
I am wearing a borrowed summer pregnancy/nursing frock. It is covered with flowers. I feel monstrous in this thing—five garish colors. But the baby stares and smiles and is u
tterly mesmerized by its patterns—it is clear she has never seen anything this beautiful. And so I put it on every day and cry.
I wonder why no one mentions how physically and emotionally depleting breast-feeding is. A very well-kept secret.
We pass the enzyme back and forth in something like peace.
Will you one day pass my immunities on to another generation? Long after I am gone.
The rose transfigured. The transfigured rose.
To have scarcely realized it—how very hard it would be—how impossible the world—how hard to stay alive without being able to write. A strange thing to say given the baby—and yet—how doomed I feel, how monstrously depressed. But given even a lucid half hour or so—a piece of paper—all is well—at least for the moment—at least that.
What kind of mother, I wonder, am I?
I catch the pacifier as it falls from her sleeping mouth—I guess I am that kind of mother in part.
I write this down while she cries—I guess I am that kind of mother too.
I can feel it already. The sort of mother I am going to be: violin lessons at three, alternative schools, Volvos, organic vegetables.
The sort who has waited her whole life, for her, for this. Who is going to do it right. Oh, God.
What, by the way, is a soccer mom?
16 JULY
One month old today. To mark how far one has come from that day of ultimate intensity—and to want it back perversely—and not this.
Now Elizabeth You Rest
The vast expanse of her Brazil becoming
improbable, flattened, abstracted
then finally blackening…
For perhaps the tenth time the tenth time the tenth time today
and still I go under…
New Year’s Eve—the length of beach lit up
Candles are burning in the sand—and—
Lilies released to the sea, floating, lilting
you looked to the sky…
A moon-lit night
Lota are you back in any guise?
For perhaps the tenth time the tenth time the tenth time…
Homeless once more you roam your child’s
Nova Scotia
The mother now is put away
The mother now is put away again
And childish dreams and hopes are over gone and—
You wear your dim attire.
Now Elizabeth you rest your traveling head
If only for a moment there
A home. Something less than motion, restlessness
For a moment
Lilting, trembling world.
A home there on that globe
Orb lobe
The pregnant wife of a local painter.
26 years old.
You touch her cove and rest there
If only for a moment.
Nibble a swollen finger—all that grows, that lives
A flood of blood and world.
Rosy nipple
Lovely—low
Now lower—there
The glow.
Flow and lowing
Lowering toward
The glisten—linger.
Serene in that safe floating for a while like the child…
Sucking the pulse
As if a double heartbeat might…
Dispel and rest there—the prominence of the terrain
Your wandering, dreaming head—remembering
Lota.
She is dead by her own hand.
And her Brazil now rain rainbow-ridden.
Feign for a moment the vaguest hope,
Breathe. And catch your breath there.
Milky glow and wax and wane.
This staving off—small
Harbor, love brief
Respite child growing toward
Perfection.
She might fit inside a plum
She might fit inside a goose egg—
A pumpkin shell…
As if double heartbeats—the pregnant wife—
Then triple heartbeats might
Just might dispel if only for a moment then.
No coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you… You write but go no farther.
The traveler opens her daybook, but closes it again.
Opens it:
Days that cannot bring you near
or will not,
Distance trying to appear
something more than obstinate
argue, argue, argue with me.
Rest your roaming troubled head Elizabeth.
You’re soaked in amber tilted lost a little
Caress and toss
And rest there
Something gives way a little
Those sweet coordinates
A lovely orb, a world
Alternately rose and rock and word.
This burning coast you lap at
And isn’t it something like the map-maker’s pinks
As you dip
Intensifying to rose—
Nova Scotia—snow on water
Flowers floating out, lit up
As you give in, lose a little
Gasp for breath and say good-bye now one more time those
Sweet high cries prefiguring
The yet to be born—
A lovely song in you
That cradles swaddles, protects you dear Elizabeth—
Homeless, grieving child.
And in that rosy bliss of milk and song, you rest.*
Disconcerting to say the least, to look down and see my face as a baby—my whole life about to begin.
Did my mother see a second chance in me?
Her sister used a pacifier until past the time she could go and buy them herself. Understandable, my mother said, not a very consoling childhood. Not a very comforting life. Did I bring this all back to her? Her first child. How could I have not?
17 JULY
How alien everyone and everything seems to me. Even Helen. Mom and Dad. The cats. The house. Everyone completely recognizable and yet utterly unfamiliar to me. How remote I feel. Far. They might be strangers. I do not feel at home here. It’s like a particularly bad episode of the Twilight Zone. There seems no hope in the world. Such solitude. I walk into it, this black vortex, only this time cradling an infant.
Still I can write black and vortex, and that is always something.
The heroine contemplates suicide. Listening to La Gianconda.
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder
of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes
rumbling at our heels.
—Ingeborg Bachmann
My hair comes out in fistfuls. I plant it in the sorrow garden. Late at night. So much silence.
John Cage: The music never stops. It is we who turn away.
Back at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton with Judith and Zenka and Christopher. It had rained on the journey down but cleared just as we arrived. After touring the mansion we walked far out on the boardwalk and were tossed by the Channel’s fierce wind and waves. Judith and Zenka are both talking, but it’s almost impossible to hear what they are saying. I am in the middle; they are holding my hands. It will be the last time we will all be together outside a hospital room. I can almost feel those waves today. Feel the wind on my face. And the tea and biscuits afterwards, having come in from the cold.
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail across the floor—
Dear ones.
First dinner guests with the baby. Louis and Louise. Louis had just mowed the lawn and was a little cranky. Helen made a fish. Louise did an Omega dance.
Welcome to the world, Rose!
I am Rose my eyes are blue
I am Rose and who are you.
I am Rose and when I sing
I am Rose like anything.
Welcome to the world.
18 JULY
Rose sees her first rose,
and is charmed—a yellow one—brought in from the garden.
My mother comes each week for two days—with a precious overnight in between. A time of great sweetness. Even if she is not entirely familiar to me. It’s all right—no one is. It’s a queer state I’m in. She brings us prepared food and is perfect with the baby and pampers me as much as she can while I basically feed the baby all day long and stare into empty space. Or on the odd day begin a perfectly unsuitable project like planting a huge new perennial garden. Plan to buy a thousand roses on sale in the fall. For Rose. A twenty-one-rose salute.
My mother is really the only one I trust with the baby. This includes myself.
Already, and it scarcely seems possible, Rose seems to connect the hand with the shadow the hand casts. My little pint-sized Plato in this our cave dwelling. Such isolation. Such small light.
20 JULY
Dreamt the baby disappeared in the night. I woke up screaming. The baby is in her bassinet, Helen says. So she is.
My internal chaos made manifest in our front yard. On the lawn: a NordicTrack, a Moses basket, a wok, a dumpster, a felt hat. It looks exactly like my interior world. Images out of surrealistic tableau—the world upside down. Thalia smiles. Each time she visits it’s a little different. One experimental stage set after the next.