pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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BABY TEETH, CRAWLING, AND POETRY

I found this Baby's First Memories book that my mother kept about me and have been looking through it tonight.

It's strange and more than a little sad to think about her scribbling this stuff about me down way back when.

She married my father when he was twenty-six and she was only eighteen.

They had my sister just ten months after the wedding and had me just fifteen months after that.

And, while, I'm never sure exactly when adult-onset paranoid schizophrenia took over my mother's (and our) world, most of my memories of her are colored by this illness.

This book allows me think about her as a nineteen-year-old mother, jotting down notes about her new babies while she and my father built the house that we would grow up in.

I like a few of the milestones she lists: Cooing and reacting to emotions and reacting to music at 1.5 months, laughing out loud at 3.5 months, crawling at 6.5 months, and taking my first step at 13 months.

And here's an entry I can't resist posting:

(10 January 1968) Bird enjoys singing and is seldom quiet. Her attention is rarely held by toys but occasionally she gets very busy, usually with boy's toys. She enjoys climbing trees and rides her tricycle very daringly. She is seldom cooperative at play and usually just wants her own way. And what a temper! She really lets us know when she's not satisfied.

Now I am settling in with a cup of hot tea and a collection of Olga Broumas's poetry collection Rave.

Here are a few sections from the sexy Caritas:

I.
Erik Satie, accused
once of formlessness, composed
a sonata titled: Composition in the Form
of a Pear. When I tell you
that it would take
more brilliance than Mozart
more melancholy precision than Brahms
to compose a sonata in the form of
your breasts, you
don't believe me. I lie
next to your infidel sleep, all night
in pain
and lonely with my silenced
pleasure. Your breasts
in their moonlit pallor
invade me, lightly, like minor
fugues. I lie
between your sapling thighs, tongue
flat on your double lips, giving
voice, giving
voice. Opulent
as a continent in the rising light, you sleep
on, indifferent
to my gushing praises. It is
as it should be, Atlantis,
Cyprus, Crete, the encircled
civilizations, serene
in their tidal basins, dolphin-
loved, didn't heed to the faint, the
riotous
praise
of the lapping sea.

2.
Your knees, those pinnacles
competing with the finest
dimpled, five-
year-old chins, are
dancing. Ecstatic as nuns
in their delirious habit, like
runaway needles on a multiple graph,
the first organic model of
seismographs, charting
the crest I keep you on
and on till all
the sensitive numbers on the
Richter scale ring out at
once, but
silently: a choir
of sundial alarums. You reach that place,
levitated by pleasure, the first
glimpse the melting
glacier must
have had, rounding the precipice,
of what came to be known as
Niagara Falls. After all this time,
every time,
like a finger inside
the tight-gummed,
spittle-bright, atavistic
suckle of
a newborn's fragile-lipped
mouth, I
embrace you, my heart
a four-celled embryo, swimming
a pulse, a bloodstream that becomes, month
to month, less
of a stranger's, more
intimate, her
own.

3.
There are people who do not explore the in-
Sides of flowers—Sandra Hochman

With the clear
plastic speculum, transparent
and, when inserted, pink like the convex
carapace of a prawn, flashlight in hand, I
guide you
inside the small
cathedral of my cunt. The unexpected
light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling, always
invisible like the wet
sides of stones, the hidden
hemisphere of the moon, startles you
with its brilliance, the little
dome a spitting
miniature of the Haghia Sophia
with its circlet of openings
to the Mediterranean sun.
A woman-made language would
have as many synonyms for pink/light-filled/holy as
the Eskimo does
for snow: Speechless, you
shift the flashlight from
hand to hand, flickering. An orgy
of candles. Lourdes in mid-August. A flurry of
audible breaths, a seething
of holiness, and
behold
a tear
forms in the single eye, carmine
and catholic. You too, my darling, are
folded, clean
round, a light-filled temple, complete
with miraculous icon, shedding
her perfect tears, in touch
with the hidden hemispheres,
the dome
of our cyclops moon.

Finally, and apropos to nothing except the fact that I just thought of it, the Ginger took one of those silly online tests once that asked her to cite the lines from a song that best described her falling in love with me. Her lines are from Slackjawed by The Connells: "I've been standing slackjawed since you've been here...."

That still makes me smile.

LISTENING TO: Lazy Afternoon, performed by Patti Austin

READING: Olga Broumas's Rave: Poems 1975–1999