Last Day of Indian Summer

Monday October 22, 1979

Dearest Child,

It is 12:50 now and we know that you have died in the womb.  Why or how, we cannot say.

Where was God?
dancing in your heart
my little unborn babe,
my little wave.

Now Dawn and I must birth your dead body out.  This is a testing time for us, and would have been for you as well, but you are dead.

Such a simple thing - death.  For one like yourself, warm and hidden in Dawn's womb I am sure it was an easy death, a happy death.  But Dead you are, and we . . . we must bear the pain.

1/3/80

Morgan

Tonight I found your picture

neatly folded, hidden in my wallet.

I remember that light filled Summer day

alive with the sound of crickets in the new-mown hay.

In the cool darkness of the hospital room they 

attached the equipment to Dawn's belly and 

opened a window on your place.

We watched you wriggle your toes with 

the careless abandon of a child.

Tiny elfling in your mama's belly

floating, gurgling in an amniotic world.

(The picture shows you smiling, I swear,

through your fluid playground.)

Strange isn't it? In a single moment I

saw your birth, your first steps, splashing baths,

fearful first days of school, dates, love, education,

beauty, work - in your wiggling toes I witnessed

the entirety of your existence.

II

The night before you died

Dawn and I lay like spoons

and I felt your nudging insistence

against my arm as I enfolded you both.

You still strove toward the light

toward freedom from your fluid world.

(Hadn't you listened to your mother

weeping in the darkness, whispering for you

to stay inside . . . where love was as real

as the blood that passed between you?)

III

As you crouched dying , slipping away

in silence, aware only of your mother's heartbeat

quietly booming in your ears,

What did you recall?

Did you hear again my muffled voice

call to you through Dawn's belly?

Purring cats kneading their paws against you?

Car rides with the sound of laughing friends?

The pull of the tide on your fluid world

when Dawn and I walked beside the sea?

In the brief span of your life

what treasures lay in the halls of your mind?

What primal impulses quicken your breast?

What did you dream as you crouched, dying?

IV

In the warm fluid darkness of the womb

what is death like?

How differs the fetal sleep from that of the dead?

Did you die in your sleep as we lay sleeping?

Death knows only questions - never answers, never answers.

When you were born you were as warm as life.

You lacked nothing save a little breath,

save God's anointing spirit.

Was death easy for you?  Letting go so painless?

I wondered how long your spirit lingered.

Did you stay by to ease our pain?

V

I recall when I was very young my

grandmother bathing me, choosing clothes

for me to wear, laying me on the kitchen

table of the farm house which haunts my dreams 

even now.

My Grandmother, my Nana, 

who herself once bore a girlchild with dark hair 

and round cheeks like your own.

Into her hands I commend your infant spirit

for safe keeping until I myself can come 

to you and hold you 

again

to my heart.

Image Source

My Dearest Son

Sunday, September 16, 1979

My Dearest Child,
On the opposite page, I have taped a picture of myself taken not long after you were conceived.  You will have seen many pictures of Dawn and I by now, but I think this is by far the best likeness of me I have ever had taken, so I include it here. I wore glasses then, too, but as I often took them off to do important work - write, read, talk, so I didn't include them here.

 We all have a mental picture of ourselves, no matter what our actual age.  Our own mental image - who we expect to see in the mirrored surface of a window as we walk down the street.  This picture represents how I imagined myself for years.  I would have been 21 at the time, I think.

Thursday, Sept. 28
My Dearest Son, if that be so,
Today I am frantically working to find you a name.  In less than two weeks, I am told, you will be born.  Are you feeling confined in the womb that has nurtured you for so long? This, my baby, is not the last of these wombs, from which you must birth out.
As to your name  - I am trying to find a name that will convey all the hopes and dreams I have of and for you, yet still give you the freedom to be who you want to be.  Right now I am taken by the name Deror - it is Hebrew for freedom, or free flowing.  Freedom is the most important thing or state of mind we can have and my hope is that freedom will always be paramount among your concerns.
Besides, having a name like Deror will set you apart, your name will have a magic which none of your peers can take from you.  this being apart is a good thing, I think.  It is in this loneliness that creative ability and art comes.
I hope that is not to heavy a burden for you to carry - such a name and such a setting apart.  I think it will be a good one - for we all carry burdens, the rocks we push up hills only to see them fall again and again.  Let us at least be happy in the struggle.  You know that I love you and apropos that is a quote from Rilke:

"All we can offer where we love is this: to love each other; for to hold each other comes easy to us and requires no learning."
                                                                         Requiem

But for now, my love must be nurturing and holding.  And preparing.

The first thing that surprises me is that two weeks before she was due, we did not know Morgan's gender.  How innocent compared to the other pregnancies, miscarriages and births, that we should know so little about what was going on in the womb.  We did have a sonogram, but it apparently showed nothing conclusive.  We still have it, in the fireproof box of course, with the birth certificates and other important papers.  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like . . . to have a son instead of daughters.  Would I have been a better father, or worse?  A better man?  What would have been my expectation for my son?  It seems like I was already freighting his life with my expectations.  What if he had grown up to be a jock?  or a stock broker?  This short journal is a treasure of what ifs and the gender of my children is certainly an interesting hypothetical topic;  as it was, three for three.  I can only hope that if Morgan, Emica or Breanne had been a boy that I would have striven to give him the same nurture and caring; the same generosity and discipline; the same love, in other words, that I have tried to give to my daughters. . .  and received in return.

Reward in Proportion

There are probably too many images going on in this poem.  I realize that now, but I tried to tie them all together at the end.  They all came to me together,as far as I can tell.  Although the topic is still love and relationships, this is the first of the 'big poems'; filled with image and metaphor at every turn.  They owe a debt to Rich, but also, obviously, to Eliot.  The three footnotes were especially significant to me, as they quoted three of my most important inspirations: the Bible, Adrienne Rich and Albert Camus.  Re-reading this poem now, it is as mysterious to me as it was when I wrote it.  We'll see what your think, Reader. Since I will be away next weekend, at least it is long enough to satisfy until I get back.

The reward is in proportion
to the nature of the quest;
We seek the mark, the place, the pole
where all polar force, all magnetism
is subsumed - is unified.


               i
The Arctic plain before us -
the jagged ice teeth hum
with cold; the snow beneath
the runners of this sled like
brittle sweets - like rock candy in our
                                                         young mouths.
The wind sucks the breath from our lungs,
transmutes into cold like ice itself
before it leaves our mouths.
Dazzling sunlight bores deep inside
our head, illuminates our brains like
the surgeon's piercing instruments (scalpel,
laser beams, various saws and rasps).
Over this wasteland we labor, toward
no particular landmark or camp.  The
compass useless, our heads bowed 
against the wind, we concentrate on
the push and lunge of the sled in
its winding path.  There 
are no warming places ahead.  (No summer days
of lazy susans beside the road - no dust,
no heat.)
This alone - this sterile frozen land -
abides now, for us.  If we are to
survive, we must learn to build
our house, our city, out of ice.
We must begin by hacking out this
crust, or perish.
We must create our  igloos out of snow,
make them 'til the crust cuts our wrists
above our mittens.  Cuts us, and our blood
mingles - pink snow on crystal ground.
It is here in this wilderness
where we have come, by our own
choice or cowardice;
It is here we must now make our camp - pitch our tent*
against the glacial winds.


          ii
You jerk against the harness,
  you proud workhorse,
                                    but not I.
Then I pull and fling myself -
                                           but not you.
The stone boat rests solid on the earth
unmoved by our struggle.
At last, by gees and haws, we
both are brought into line (the
traces jingle, hang lax for a moment.)
Then with snorts of steamy breath in the 
sparkling air, we lean and heave against the yoke.
Urged on by unseen drivers, beyond our blinders,
we strain our deep chest muscles, scrape the
frozen mud with our proud hooves.
The cleats bite against the ice,
force overcomes frozen gravity -
the stone boat jolts free of its trap
  of ice and muck.
We begin the slow pull across the 
field.  Memories of our prancing morning,
unhindered by this load,
curl away like our breath
dancing in the frost air above us.


         iii
"but a spirit can be stunned,
          a battery felt going dead
before the light flickers . . . ." she said**
and you agreed.
I have tried so long to energize
that battery, that cell.  but always
for my own use - "It's in the nature of the
battery to conserve energy for the 
  light.", I thought.
(No, it was neither so trite, nor as complex.)
I am simply the man I am.  A black
hole, yes; drawing (even) light energy
 to my depths.
But also the crackling nebula in your 
quiet space.  I illuminate in my
consumption, create and dissipate my energy
like solar flares, surging radio-magnetism.


          iv
Which leaves the cold and darkness between
the galaxies of light.  The infinite spaces
between the crystal beach of space 
                                                      of night.


"One always finds one's burden again."***


The crunch of ice beneath the explorer's boots
who seek the place where polarity gives 
way to one unifying energy.
The crunch of snow beneath the hooves,
horses drawing endless boats across the sky,
each piled high with lunar nodes.


The unity of image draws its force
  from its source.
The reward is in proportion
to the nature of the quest.

*Allusion to the Gospel of John, 1:14: "And the Word was made flesh, and pitched His tent among us."
** from "The Key", A. Rich 1967
***"The Myth of Sisyphus", A Camus, 1942



Image Credit

The Myth and the Hard Truth

"You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero.  He is, as much as through his passions as through his torture.  His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.  This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth."

"If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious.  Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

 The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.  But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it become conscious.  Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his decent.  The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.  There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

"All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein.  His fate belongs to him.  His rock is his thing.  Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.  In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory.  there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night."

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain!  One always finds one's burden again.  but Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.  He too concludes that all is well.  This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile.  each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.  the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Albert Camus

from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays