The Room Lit by Roses

by Carole Maso

  Well yes, according to Plato all learning is a kind of remembering of a world the soul saw before its birth, the vision of which it loses in the process of becoming embodied, but of which it can be reminded with carefully selected promptings. I believe this.

  Bataille: We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. Our obsession is with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is.

  How she has loved from the first day to be naked. And not curled in the fetal position. Her arms outstretched. A rose opening…

  This little long-distance swimmer. Moving through the ocean of air. A July like no other.

  Little marathon cyclist. Pedaling and pedaling in the dark. I remember another summer, La Tour de France. Ten years ago this month.

  Little stepper, stepping and stepping. Où vas tu?

  Barbara brings Rose her own Rose of Sharon tree! It is named Helene. We will plant it by the pond. Love it, watch it grow. Barbara is very, very fond of this little baby, I can tell.

  Fran and the boys come to visit. She is most comforting, most kind. She says she wanted to kill Tobin in the beginning. Hated everyone and everything. She shows up now with her stories, just in the nick of time—remembering. Leslie Lawrence calls too. The most difficult of times. These wonderful mothers lending a hand. A genuine consolation.

  Up all night every night. Each day spent doing interpretive dances with rabbit head and rattle. I am feeling very crazy.

  It’s only a very particular kind of day when I have the heart for certain things: giving the baby a real bath, trying a new breastfeeding position, using the baby sling. I need to do everything in my own tortoise time. Helen tries to force me and I snap at her, I hate you, I hate you. And I do. Everything at times over whelming. Is it the lack of sleep? The blur of breast-feeding? The newness? Disorientation. Except for this notebook I haven’t written a word. And what am I? Nothing I can recognize. It makes me very, very frightened.

  The La Leche League people feel like a cult. Don’t even think of giving the baby a bottle of breast milk. She might not take it. You’ll be out to dinner, you’ll come home and she’ll be screaming with hunger and then how will you feel? They give me the creeps.

  Disheartened to be the old self again. The cruel withdrawal of the happy hormones. Such well-being once. I’m sure of that.

  It worries me now—but it is more true than almost anything else—that wherever I stood, there was always a part of me that was absent from the scene, apart. Something in me that was always elsewhere. And it was not that I was indifferent or passive, of which I was so often accused. Something was being held in reserve—and not entirely by choice.

  Oh, literally thousands of things to worry about, now that I am my old self again.

  When I look out my window a purple finch is feeding her babies in the eaves under the front porch.

  Rose eats constantly today, it seems. Something about those birds.

  When I can be objective and relaxed and at ease, which is almost never, I see she is a very, very sweet-tempered, charming little thing.

  I happen to make excellent babies. We both agree.

  When I take her outside I drape her body in my body’s shadow. To shield her from the sun. As if one could.

  Helen, when you say you will be home early I expect you to be here, because I am unraveling. More than usual.

  The way the whole being searches for the voice—as if a figure out of Beckett. Yearns toward the voice.

  The way the mouth searches for the thumb.

  I seem to remember now my mother leaving a room or entering a room and how the world kept ending and beginning again. Darkness and then light. Shadows on the wall. Strange to be remembering such a thing now.

  Shadows Roses Shadow

  Under an alien sky

  shadow roses

  shadow

  on an alien earth

  between roses and shadows

  in an alien water

  my shadow

  —Ingeborg Bachmann

  How much solace still in poems.

  That she has every sound and every syllable in every language ever known. And that after a year it shall disappear.

  To be at once completely alert and completely helpless, lucid and bewildered. Not unlike the state I am in when writing. Difficult to articulate.

  Ilene and I are both delighted to have each other to confide in about all this—the island of motherhood. I wish I could have been there for her five years ago when David was born. But I could not.

  I did not rise above my flawed, mournful temperament. A sorrow to me still. Once we thought we might have a child together. Men never entered it. Clearly they were altogether far too high maintenance. Or that was my stance and I think I assumed it was hers. She is married now. To a very nice fellow indeed. He takes David on the back of his bicycle to Harlem for breakfast. They like to read the newspaper together.

  A grave endeavor. It strikes me hard today. I have created something that is going to die.

  Most miraculous being. Conceived in motion. Child of star and ocean and want. On a wing and a prayer. Child of deepest and most charmed, most precious and perfect night. The planets aligned. Diane comes to visit. She holds her like a charm. This sweet perfect little one. Forgive your mother, her doubts, her sorrow, all the weeping, rage, tears.

  The two dwarf pear trees she planted in the field that were us. That is me, Helen, the one on the right, dying.

  No need to mention the suicide notes composed in my head in the bleaker hours—or the little makeshift wills left here and there around the house. In the event of my death…

  I wheel you around the peripheries of light—too bright—for now.

  I will plant you a thousand roses.

  The solitude doubles, then triples—as if I did not have enough to begin with.

  Whenever I wonder what I am supposed to be doing, how to act, what to say, I ask myself—what would my mother have done? And then I do exactly that. It is a gift like no other in this world. All the judgment calls. All the sacrifices my mother made. The example of my mother’s life.

  You don’t know how you got here—back to your impossibly warm bed—or where the other people went. It was a party maybe—voices, laughter, the clinking of glasses, all dissolved. Lulled to sleep in the back seat in what you knew was perfect safety and protection—washed and dressed in your pajamas and at home all of a sudden. When did that happen? All you know is that you’re there—and that they saw to it. Without missing a beat. This perfect peace. My mother and father. That is the kind of parent I would like to be.

  That the children should come first. My parents so unlike most parents, who were all so involved in their adultness or in their immaturity—trying to have a life, sure they were missing something, and they were, especially since they were all in their twenties back then. Of course they were missing a great deal.

  But even at my age—I feel how much more I will have to forgo—my whole old way of life permanently altered. Already I can feel it. How much about giving up this will be. But I am well used to it. Another thing writing has taught me.

  The silence is assertive, active these days. A third presence among us in the dark at night where the baby sucks and I pray.

  The dizzying and terrifying shift seemingly overnight from no one can hurt us to no one can protect us.

  And the old prayers come back automatically, involuntarily—without my consent exactly.

  Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world have mercy on us.

  Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world grant us peace.

  I give you this world—Mozart, all kinds of music, poetry, mother’s milk…

  That I have created something so human, so vulnerable—this sensual being. Her obvious pleasure by the feeling of the air on her skin. Heat and light. Her desperate needs, wants—to be gratified.

  Our time here is fini
te but for a little while. Placed in its crucible for nine months, it felt like a kind of infinity. Odd. Something to be savored. Not to be missed.

  Nor the strangeness. The violence of birth. The beauty of creation. And all that serenity. And changing shape. And giving in. And sleep.

  Across mountains of heavenly floating roses

  From which one drops every night

  To reward the sleeper with the most beautiful dream of all.

  —Robert Desnos

  My life more a mystery than ever.

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.

  And who can tell where one body ends and the other one starts. Or where the music begins, or where the music ends…

  I love you. I think I can say that today.

  Early evening. In another room she sleeps peacefully. I play with the baby monitor—the devise that listens in on her breathing, her sleep. I turn up the volume. Adjusting the silence.

  Longing for that time again. Pregnancy—when it seemed time stopped or reversed itself. I grew younger and younger. My aging resumed again on the day of the baby’s birth—or speeded up perhaps to compensate. This inexorable motion now. There’ll be no going back. There will be no going back there again. To feel now as if I were being slammed into the future. A terrifying thing. But once, once for a precious, precious time—I was alive—and I was not dying.

  Lamb inside. Our amniotic life. Through the rose window in my mind. It was a precious time.

  And I am left with myself now. The baby already far off on a distant horizon, waving.

  The baby twinkling. Dark star. Most perfect night.

  Rocking on the rock-a-bye.

  I shall never forget it—that florescence into which she was lifted.

  They really do point with one tiny finger upward toward the heavens, like the infant Christ, in the great renaissance paintings.

  __________

  * This is an étude about the poet Elizabeth Bishop, her long-term lover Lota who committed suicide, and Elizabeth’s affair with a young pregnant woman.