On Infertility

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 1^st

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