Gravity’s Promise
Cloistered
in the dailiness of my life
an ancient voice
howls in celebration of curves,
a song of tides.
it lures me upstream to spawn
against the currents with salmon flesh,
and hands polished smooth
like bone or shell
after years of turbulence.
With these hands, I navigate
the salty waters that run red,
pulse through the pain,
and towards the future- to tell a tale
of stones and blossoms
romanced by gravity,
in syllables of green.
Here are some of my thoughts about writing poetry as I struggle with the process of trying to find a language to communicate the birth of my third child. I realized as I trying to find words and metaphors to give expression to this experience, that I live with images a long time before committing them to language. I wait until the words move through my head in a particular way, creating a certain rhythm. It is as important to me as the images are in moving the story forward. I am preoccupied with the relationship of the body to community, and of the body to landscape, and with wanting to cultivate a language that sounds like water moving over stones. I do not know how to do this. Images of water moving through and around matter haunt me… creep into my writing in mysterious ways.
I began this writing project, using the subject of my last child's birth, on the advice of a friend who is a poet. It was a fast birth- thirty-five minutes from four centimeters to my child's first breath. I had experienced the power of precipitous birth with my second child. During the second birth, I succeeded in anchoring my attention on tangible things, and emerged from the experience feeling accomplished. I felt, "This is something I know." My third birth was different. I was in a dream, everything became fuzzy, and at some point I couldn't see very well. Maybe my eyes were just closed very tightly, I do not know. A pink aura surrounded everything alive in the room. Voices sounded far away, and I was on fire. White fire seared through my thighs, ripping me apart, and I screamed, "It hurts, it hurts" like some sort of a mantra. I felt I was dying. My son's father walked to where I was kneeling. I remember our foreheads touching, as he whispered "It's OK." His breath was reassuring, and I believed him when he told me I would be OK. We were lying on our sides facing each other when our son emerged from between our legs. It took me a few minutes to feel like I was in the room again. Before I could do this, I had to sit upright, and look into the face of my child
When trying to write about this experience, what first came to mind is how my older children would run home from school every day, and how we would all huddle around the baby like he was a campfire. I decided that the desolation I experienced with his labor was like an ice storm. I remember walking through a blizzard as a child, and not being able to see anything in front of my face. I've heard that when precipitation freezes during an ice storm, the leaves of trees often become so heavy that the branches break, and it kills the tree. I thought to myself, "This is what I felt." I learned that sometimes the moisture inside the nostrils of livestock freezes, leading to suffocation. I thought to myself, "This is why I had to scream… I had to open my mouth and scream to get enough air… in order to breath." I began to think of my son's father's voice as something warm calling me to the other side, and my baby as the warm reward after the storm.
Still when trying to begin this process, the following phrase unrelated to ice storms came to me…
Older than the moon,
and darker than
the sky she hangs in,
my pain pushes me.
I tried to continue to tell the story, despite the unexpected turn the words took…
Older than the moon.
and darker than the sky
she hangs in, my pain
pushes me- I cannot
remember the women
that came before
on this cold
January morning.
(see I am trying to develop this winter storm idea)
I got hung up on" p" words for awhile, and played with phrases like "more primate than pilgrim"- but discarded all these as affected. Don't like them. Don't like the image of being on a journey. Don't mind using it in conversation with other women, but it is a tired metaphor in poetry. I stall. My academic writing becomes a bit more inspired. I decide my qualitative research proposal on labor pain is really important. I want to be wrapped up in the stories women tell about their pain in labor, as if they were a quilt keeping me warm. I want to rock back and forth in the rocking chair I rocked my dolls in, rocked my babies in- while wrapped up in this quilt. I want to grow old sitting and rocking like this. It occurs to me that this birth was my initiation into midwifery. It was what launched me into midwifery, made me feel like I could claim it as my own. It is how I came to know the call I had been hearing was really meant for me after all, and that it was OK to want this, to long for it out loud.
It then occurred to me that “Gravity’s Promise” was my poem about this birth, it just wasn't about my terror, my feeling of imminent death. It was written from the perspective of having already arrived at the other side. Only the phrase 'hands polished smooth, like bone or shell, after years of turbulence," alluded to my suffering. I wanted something that honored the passage of mother and son together, something more personal. I remembered the beginning of a short story I had written when I started midwifery school last year. It was about going out into the water with my son, the evolution of our rafting and rowing, and our ability to move over the surface of the water. I started to think that maybe somewhere in this story was the poem I was looking for…
The water always creeps back in…
After the reservoir
closed for the season,
mother and son
began launching
their inflatable yellow raft
in a nearby salt marsh.
Together they enjoyed the sensation
of pulling away from the shore,
while familiar objects
grew small and distant.
Fishing gear was put away, and
with binoculars and field guides,
they committed to memory
the names of shorebirds.
Feeling the pull of currents,
his mother learned to move
through water, and remembered
what it was like to be
the buoyant vessel
carrying the seed
pollinated by wind and water,
over the tumultuous waves,
and to the other side.
Read Pam's research proposal on labor pain.