two new poems

new work, at long last. the "sketches" below are an ongoing project--my hope is to have many haiku that capture the momentary and fleeting thoughts, emotions, etc. i have been so compelled to record since the moment evie was born. they are intended to be stand-alone haikus, each linked by the title and a loose trope.

again, i am thinking of jack spicer, who gave up writing single, stand-alone poems (what he called "one night stands") in favor of the sequence or short book. undoubtedly the influence of his one-time lover and mentor robert duncan...nonetheless, i am tending more and more toward the same decision. i've always been more a sequence/short book writer, and even writing the first poem of a new "idea" has spurred me into a full-fledged series. i'm very conscious of my personal mythology, and the way in which all of my poems seem to puzzle themselves together. i.e., the abuelito poems, the rothko poems, the car accident poems, the letters to my sister, and "for the man i loved" series, and now what i have been working on since about a year post-birth, this series about evie/jeremy/myself.

the second poem is more concerned with that almost terrifying need to document (lest i forget) the magical little cocoon we were in when evie was first born, and the strange sense that for the first time, i understood what it was like to be truly one person after having been two for so long.

obviously this links in with the sketches (the thought of having had two separate lives) and a conversation i had with my sister after both our children were born--that it had become hard and almost unsettling to go back to being just one person. such is the glory, and the inevitable sadness, of pregnancy and birth.

TO NAME THE LIGHT ITSELF (AND NOT ONLY THE THINGS…ILLUMINATED)[i]

sketches for my daughter

We are twenty months

in our own bodies. You curl

still against my gut.

The moon pulls water, carves.

You’ve been both my Grand Canyon

and my Rio Grande.

You’ve eclipsed all, my

first life passed with your birth cry:

turn out all false lights. [ii]

---

[i] About Rothko, Dore Ashton

[ii] “15 Poems for a Lunar Eclipse None of Us Saw”, Diane Wakoski

SOME KIND OF BLUE (A POEM FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY)

The glow of the National Football League playoff game,

all lights in the room shut off

or barely more than a dimming,

the star-like pants of each man in line,

your father asleep on a couch;

as they run, his eyelids flash

with the light of their steps

the television pulsing.

I walk flat-footed to the mirror and look

for the first time: my stomach below

a blue scar appearing, as though they opened my skin

with a sapphire, the same shade as my favorite eyeliner

when I was fifteen-- but this line no lashes, only staples.

Wide-eyed and silent you watch, hot air balloons

dotting your receiving blanket.

How glad I am for the small weight

of the flannel, wrapping you

who seem too small to be real

you, who took so long to bring

and there is so much I want to tell you already: your eyes are opaque cobalt

but surely will turn brown; we listened to Miles Davis

in room number seven of the maternity ward;

when I held you the first moment

your father took a picture, and the blue of the surgical drape

made me feel like an ancient Italian icon, though the photo

never registered on the camera. Something blocking the lens.

I want to rupture the hush, read you

Frank O’Hara’s Poem (For Rachmaninoff’s Birthday), but

there is so much I am forgetting:

the glare of the windows is blue. And the curtains, drawn against the lights

of the bar across the street—they turn and shudder in on themselves:

people waiting for a bus.

What I tell you: in this moment, I think we are the only two

wondering what it will be like to be just one person each.