Evabird, you're just two days over six months, and already you love words.
Painting by Pat Saunders-WhiteEvabird, all weekend we’ve been in the Catskills with friends. There’s laughter and bare skin and trees taller than any you’ve ever seen. Yesterday we sat by the lake, and I shaded you with my body. Shadows, I told you, this is what the sun makes of us. The pond thrummed with the sound of mating frogs, and the sky changed over and over: stone to white-wall to bluer than blue.
Last year, when my dear friend Zoe and I met up for our annual walk around Prospect Park, we were surprised--and thrilled--to find out that we'd both managed to get ourselves knocked up since we'd last seen each other. (No wonder we'd been too busy to get a coffee!) And so we walked. And walked. And walked. All around the park, all the months of our pregnancies, planning our drug-free, surprisingly painless births and trying to fathom the beings that grew inside of us.
Evabird, you've grown too big to sleep on my chest. For months, I pinned you there and held you until you stopped crying, until your breath grew rhythmic, until you slept and slept and finally woke. It's been almost six months, and still, I can't get enough of you. You smell like lavender and stewed apples and wishes gone good, and I bury my nose into your neck and lift you into the sky and think of how much more you'll grow, think of jumpropes and hopscotch and T-shirts and bubblegum, and my heart clenches a bit, wanting to keep you this close forever. This. Close. Always.A pond will deepen toward the center like a plate
we traced its shallow rim my mother steering
my inner tube past the rushes where I looked
for Moses we said it was a trip around the world
in China we wove through curtains of willow
that tickled our necks let's do that again
and we'd double back idle there lifting
our heads to the green rain
swallows met over us later I dreamed
of flying with them we had all the time
in the world we had the world
how could those trees be weeping?
by Jody Gladding
