Black-throated Warbler

Identification may be difficult and may be made on the basis of song alone.

The Calender

I keep promising myself I'll write about other things: write about those late days of summer, or the pumpkins, or the wind, or how these last few weeks the sunsets have been so pretty, always a different color. Pink, I say to Eva, or Gold, or, Look, baby, look how the bottoms of the clouds are bright white and the tops are heavy and gray.

Yesterday, we played outside until our fingers were numb, and I could swear I saw my breath. But surely it's too early for that--isn't it?

There's a calender that hangs in our kitchen that I look at when I'm washing apples or heating up a can of soup. So-and-so's birthday, it says, or Dinner with the Who's-It's. But lately I can't stop noticing the scribbles.

On the calender, in the lower right-hand corner of every Friday, I had counted the weeks. 1, 2, 3, all the way to 40, and at 40, I had drawn a big heart. 40 was when the baby would come. It would be the dead of winter but we wouldn't mind because we'd just hole up until the flowers bloomed and then, come spring, we'd emerge.

Now, though, I've scribbled out the numbers. There's nothing but a dark blue mark (scrawled with my favorite pen), and unless you get really close, unless you really try to see it, you'd never know what week it is, never know how much longer to go, or--as fate has it--not go, never know any of it, really. Still, at the end, there is the heart: fat and white, a would-be snowflake hanging onto the edge of the new year, in danger of little more than disappearing with another turn of the calender page.

The Aesthetician

There are people you must tell, people who knew you were pregnant: the lady who wanted to start the book club, your boss, the Russian woman who waxes you.

Today, she has your leg lifted in the air and you remember absently, something in her voice, how she once told you of her brother, back home, how he suffers from schizophrenia. The winters, she had said, are the worst.

Now, she clicks her tongue at you. Exercising? she says. Not when you are with a baby! In my culture, she tells you, it is believed that a pregnant woman carries a bundle of glass. Glass, she repeats. Too fragile. She shakes her head.

The g in her fragile is a hard g, the g of fragments, of figments, of figs. She lifts your other leg, and you think again of broken things. Outside, the sun is warm, maybe the last really warm sun of the year. Don't worry. You'll be back in it soon.

To Lose

To lose; as in, misplace; as in, it took my mother years to forgive me for losing that old blue sweater; or to lose, as in not win; as in, every time I play Scrabble with my mother I'm reminded of what it means to lose, I mean, really lose.

And then, there is this: after a long summer and the sideways glances, the saying it: I lost the baby. Louder, again, because maybe they didn't hear. Lost. Or understand. I lost the baby, I say; the baby was lost. Or hearing it whispered through thin cubicle walls: there was a baby; she lost it.

I keep imagining flipping the couch cushions and dumping out all my bags, tearing the whole house apart, root to stem, the whole place unearthed for a singular recovery.

Instead, I roll the grammar of it all in my head: to lose, to have lost, lost. Lost. And suddenly, I find myself in the classroom with my new students, and I am fumbling with folders, Welcome, I say. Where do we begin?

And with the water, my heart

There are peaches growing on the neighbor's tree. All these years and I hadn't noticed them, but today they are there: plump and golden-bottomed. I can't imagine that they're sweet. Brooklyn peaches--who ever heard of such a thing?

But still I want them. If I close my eyes, I can smell them. Close them a bit longer, and I can maybe even taste them.

I also see: a blue ribbon tied to the sliding glass door, a glass of iced coconut juice, a ring on the wood beneath the glass, a vase with flowers, the ceiling fan going forever around. All this from my bed, where I've been two days now on doctor's orders.

Wednesday night it rained so hard, raining and raining, and the sliding door was open, and I was dreaming of all the rain falling, and it was falling still. At almost dawn, I woke up, and I knew my water had broken. All that wild rain. Broken. Water.

We had just found out that I'm carrying a boy, have been carrying him for twenty weeks; found out that he has a strong spine and two beautiful femurs and a perfect brain, and then this: this which has me laid up in bed begging for prayers.

Outside now, the sun is starting to set. Nights, I've found, are hardest, especially after Eva has gone to bed, and I don't have her laughter to make me forget. Or make me remember. To accompany me. To calm me.

Rain on glass. A late summer storm. Clouds moving in and away and in again. The smell of peaches, the pinking of the sky. Send love our way. Send love. Love.

Question

“Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?”

(yes.)

Find out more here.

Almost May

April did not drown us, and that in itself seems worth celebrating. There was no tiny blue boat that whisked us helplessly down the Gowanus and into the Atlantic, further and further out, until we were only blue on blue on sky and then that was blue too. Instead we were a wash of fallen cherry blossoms and mandarin peel and memory. These are the things I've been thinking about: poems (this one) and dying and how Grandpa used to let us eat ice cream for breakfast; the museum in midtown with the deep ceilings; breakfast with Tess and her soft-boiled eggs; sidewalk mangoes with hot sauce; Sanj teaching me to use chopsticks when we were in our twenties and sushi was infinitely exciting; street corners and Sky City and boatcars; that drive into the mountains to see Mama Heaton because we knew she wouldn't make it to Christmas; how far Hawaii is; how cold the wind can be.

Eva has started singing, and so afternoons, I dig deep, surprised by the number of songs I remember. It's amazing how much we carry inside.

Eva's Words

Home, moon, bubble.

Day 490

Day of white flower in hair,
of first Easter egg hunt, first skinned knee,
first ice cream cone to make it better

Labors of Love

One of my students has just completed the construction of one thousand paper cranes. He's a soft-spoken boy with glasses who admits that he loved church basement Ping-Pong long before he loved anything else.

The birds, he tells me, are kept in freezer-sized Ziploc baggies in groups of one hundred. Last week, in his essay about art critic John Berger, he confessed that he'd created all one thousand birds for a girl. He didn't mention if he had ever given the birds to the girl, only mentioned that after a while, they weren't birds at all, they were something else entirely.

Then the weekend came, and Eva--very early Saturday--woke up with a fever. She was hot to the touch, and I was bleary-eyed, and I kept whispering to her that I was sorry--not for anything but for everything--and at least half a dozen times I went in to put my hand on her warm back, and I pressed a cold washcloth to the soles of her feet and measured out Motrin and sang about stars. Her fevers affect me like nothing else; somehow they contain every illness and playground injury, every paper-cut and heartbreak; they make me weepy and lonely, and every time I go in to press my wrist to her neck, I get more scared and more grateful.

When I was 20 or 22, I loved a boy who left me poems everywhere, tiny poems scrawled on torn-up pieces of paper. He left them in the medicine cabinet and the butter-dish, in my apron pockets and old notebooks. For years, I discovered them. They were beautiful in their way, and for a long time I wondered if I hadn't loved the boy quite enough or long enough, but by then he was gone--making t-shirts in Queens, someone said--and love, then, seemed to matter far less than time.

I think of my student and his thousand paper cranes, and I want to write him an email:

Dear B.--
Eva suffered a fever,
and I fell into an old & magical loop.

I've been thinking about your birds.
Please don't give them all away.
Keep at least one for yourself.

N.

When I was a girl--5 or 6--I found a seagull feather in the parking lot of the Sanitary Fish Market. I remember loving that feather, carrying it everywhere and sucking on its end. I'm not sure now, but probably, I thought that it could make me fly. Still, somehow, I knew that it was forbidden and I'd wait until I was alone before bringing it to my mouth. I think it was my first great privacy: the first thing I really kept from my mother, my first labor of love.

How We Spend Our Days

Winter Still

I am bone-tired, child--fractured--
split from the base of my neck
to the strange quiet place you have carved in me.

What I Don't Know

I don't know if a vegan brownie and a handful of Ruffles and two tortillas microwaved with cheese equal dinner; or how you sleep so peacefully; or the names of very many constellations; or if I can remember, I mean really remember, what it was like to be a girl, to be eight or fifteen, to do back-bends and dress up like a cave woman and not be so practiced-practiced with my lip gloss and my hellos; and, frankly, I don't know what it means to be able to write and teach and think and be a mother and a wife and a friend, not all at once anyway; and so I do what I can, which right now is not very much; it's just this; (at least I'm not checking facebook!); at this moment, I am doing nothing but this (And nibbling crumbs and trying to remember and watching you dream on the video monitor).

The Emptiness that Surrounds Them

We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was they way people read the night sky.

From John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos