Saturday, July 01, 2006

Morning Song

This pregnancy is beginning to grow on me! (pun intended) I feel like the line from that Sylvia Plath poem, "cow-heavy and floral." I see my smooth round belly and it makes me smile. I notice babies everywhere. I was leaving my office yesterday and saw a Mexican woman with a plump pudding bag baby tossed over her shoulder- he seemed to be staring at me. I felt a longing. Now that my kids have been told, they fall all over themselves being nice to me. (I would have told them much sooner if I'd known I'd get this reaction.) Now the dishes get washed, the flowers get watered, the floors get swept without my asking. Heaven forbid that I should be seen carrying anything. Best of all, I feel nicer. I rarely raise my voice, I want to be kind to everyone, even my husband. I especially love the smell of him. We sleep spooned together with his hairy arm tickling my skin, wrapped tightly around me. (my favorite sensory experience in the whole wide world, followed closely by eating a whole carton of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey icecream. I let the chocolate chunks melt right in my mouth, then take a bite of the cold creamy banana flavored cream and crunch the walnuts all together for the magical combination of warm chocolate and cold ice cream and crunchy nuts.) I spend lots of time looking at my 5 month pregnant belly. It's quite beautiful to behold- so smooth and big and round. My breasts really are cow-heavy and I waddle like a duck when I walk. My eight year old daughter told me the other day, "Mommy, you're pretty." She's right, I am- I feel I must be the most exquisite woman that ever lived. I think I must be falling in love.

Morning Song

by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

1 comment:

LaborPayne said...

You are welcome. Thank you for your kind words.