Reality

Already knee-deep in soggy Cheerios and Disney gold glitter, the woman, 36-weeks pregnant, wondered what she had gotten herself into.

Bluer than Lake Louise

from Good Morning America

Dear Zoe--

This morning I read about a family
of blue people, something in their blood.
If they had had a little more of the "thing,"
it would have killed them;
a little less, no one would have known.

How are you?
Did the Minnesota snow ever fall?

It is Ash Wednesday, and here in Brooklyn,
foreheads are smudged,
and people are mumbling promises.
I think of all the things I could give up:
chocolates and coffees,
the internet, old desires.

Luna was the bluest in the family.
She birthed 13 children
and lived to be 84.
Luna, Luna. 
Her skin was bluer than Lake Louise.

I remember my brother's lips
turned bluer than blue when he was cold,
and I remember a moon following the car,
and I remember thinking my mother's eyes
seemed more violet than blue.
I remember when I first met you.

Any day now, my second daughter is due.
(I am eleven shy of Luna.
I am huge; I am scared.)
Come home soon.
Brooklyn is blue without you.

N.

Dreams

I have a post up over at the brand new Teachers & Writers blog. Read it: here. Enjoy!

On the Growing Anxiety of Mothering an Infant (again)

Baby cakes and baby faces, and oh, the baby shoes with baby laces. 

Baby blankets and baby socks; baby tick and baby tock. 

Baby laughed, and baby cooed; mommy wept, and daddy swooned. 

Baby this and baby that; baby peed and baby shat. 

Baby came, and when she came, mama's brain went the way of rain. 

But baby grew, and mama too, and now they laugh and are rarely blue,

but there are days--rainy and warm--

when mama's head still feels like a storm.

When Physics is Poetry

From Bertrand Russell:

We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.

Happy New Year

Love, E of the 4 lines

and me

Tuesday

My hands smell like clementines right now, and it's strange because I would hope the scent would send me to some beach somewhere--all blue sky and warm water--where, some day not so long ago between sunrise and sunset, I ate citrus by the bucketful. Instead, I think about the sticky Bath & Body lotions of seventh grade, of strolling the mall, of the perpetual longing to know who might be smoking a cigarette at the food court, of dousing my hands in peachy lotion, chewing another stick of gum.

I've been trying to remember how I felt last Christmas. I must have been sad, at least a little. I mean, after all, in ways my body was still "expecting" a baby in January, a baby that had miscarried so late just a few months before, and yet, when I look at last year's pictures, they're not so different from this year's. Cody and I sit in the same seats at my mother's house for Christmas Eve dinner, our plates are piled high: ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, asparagus for good measure. We are smiling.

Eva is next to the tree. Santa has been there--of course, Santa has been there, with his pink piano or his dress-up box. He has eaten the cookies we left out for him and drunk the milk, and, in Eva's stocking, are wind-up toys and bubbles, and in mine are the panties and the Starbucks card I've come to expect after creeping down my mother's stairs to see, as I say over and over to Eva, if "Santa came."

There are other pictures too. From childhood. Joe with a robot, me and my ballerina doll, Dave, fat-cheeked, Kenny and a reindeer. They all seem so incomplete. And even though I know that, in ways, they're all I have, that without them, I might not even remember I had ever owned a ballerina doll, might not even be able to recall how when I pressed down on her crown she'd spin and spin until I was dizzy with laughter, sometimes it still feels so partial.

Maybe that's why I bother with this blog at all: to try to remember in a richer, fuller way than the Facebook world allows. To say: Today, two days after Christmas, in a house where everyone but me is still sleeping, I am nostalgic for what has passed and what has not passed; I am grateful and anxious; my heart is spinning and spinning, and the air is thick with the scent of clementines. That's all. Not much more than this: Tuesday. December 27, 2011. I am ready for coffee (my in-law's sugar shaker forever charming) and hoping that, before I make it to the bottom of the cup, the people I love will wake and join me in the bright gray light of the breakfast nook.