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| suspended hand in his studio: daniel chester french |
On Infertility
Whatever it is I have looked for
Is tiny, so tiny it can dance in the palm of my hand.
Charles
Wright
Looking
Around
Selected Poems & Late
it’s the
opening. it states where,
do I
begin? Because At my elbow: Kaddish
for an
Unborn Child. And Deaf
Republic. And all those short
stories by
the Yiddish
writer I.
L. Peretz I’ve been
meaning to
get to. So I open
Bye and Bye
instead. To the last
line of the
first stanza, his
“1 March,
1998, where do I begin again?”
& it
makes me need
to create my own 1 March 19-
98 nearly two years into the doomed
1st
marriage. I was finishing a year
but
really two because
I
transferred back home from Boulder
of
reading poetry & all her essays.
I
kept to it & to students & to
hauling
books around in a city
bus. I was unconceivable. I’d
read
without reading that book
by Kertesz. He was from the same
country I found
myself in
though our
distance between each
other meant we’d
never know
one another. Hungary.
Hungry.
Aside from the
obvious, that being
I couldn’t read
Hungarian – we had one thing
in common – we
couldn’t
bring a child into
this world. Of course
yes it was for
profoundly
different reasons
– though as intimately
familiar & as
personal. His: Auschwitz.
Mine? I was
alone. Married, yes.
But utterly
alone. With, it turns out, a broken womb. Let’s go back
to Wright: he’s
seeing
a man seeing &
objects & didn’t I just see
an article seeing
these still
lives in bottles
and in urns and in pitchers
with the lip to hip handles . . .
the paintings of Giorgio
Morandi…
it’s a
resurrection which makes me want
to say without the
dead there cannot be
a thing brought
back to life. But I want to
tell you this one
last thing: I watched
the unhinged
tissue & blood float
in the toilet
bowl. I watched
for something out
of this mucous
that could have
been a thumb, an eye-
lid, a hip, I
watched it in the toilet
I saw what I saw
in that shocked
gawk that made me
a selective mute
about the whole
affair. I hurt like I was burning
but I watched it &
probably it was
my body that
wasn’t blind
just bent to
accommodate the wave
wave wave of it
all while I tried, while
it was tried, to wash
itself into being
extinguished.
bouquet beneath the weeping
beech
greely park
nashua, nh
