Five poems by Faith Van Alten Lee

TRANQUILITY

The view from this old plaid armchair is limited:

a wooden chest of drawers left by the woman who sold us the house,

a pair of new closet doors, painted white, with red knobs,

and the window between, with its telephone pole, 

     the tops of some cedars gone wild and tall,

     and the midsection of a cottonwood trunk.



Everyone asks to move the TV up here for me

but nursing is the only time our daughter

lets me cradle her like a baby.



So much beauty in such a new face

it startles me every time I look down and follow

the curve of her forehead, the curve of her nose.

From this angle she has one intelligent eye which neither blinks

nor holds my gaze but somehow indicates she can hear well enough

though she's never responded to music, the doorbell,

     my voice, or tears in any visible way.



Our small white dog,

so anxious about his status in this new equation,

scrambles up and stretches out on my outstretched legs,

tucks his chin between my ankles.



Warm dog on my legs, warm mouth at my breast,

I keep my back to the door and chaos

and look out at the furrowed bark of the cottonwood.

A knot at the top attracts blackbirds from time to time but 

whether it holds rain water or the start of a nest, 

I can't be sure.



I run a finger over this baby's sparse hair,

offer my thumb to her long fine fingers.

They wrap around it tight.

I have sat in this chair at this window

every two hours for weeks now and yet today

there's a haze of green in the weed trees across the tracks

that I never saw coming.

RAIN LONG COMING

She tests her heart:

it is as hard as the Illinois prairie under her perennial garden.

If the baby had perished even three weeks ago she would never

have recovered completely -- she knows this -- but the excitement has

evaporated and the child she carries remains a stranger.



She pulls the hose out to the far garden,

three hoses, actually, screwed together.

They are heavy and so is she and she stands to catch her breath

before walking back through the heat to turn on the water.

The wispy columbines, the true geraniums, Mrs. Moon, evening

primrose, three varieties of hosta -- none of them are currently in

bloom.

The sprinkler will keep the plants alive but will not mend the

deep fissures in the ground.



Automatically, her left hand slides over her belly to the place

the child now stirs.

Even feeling this way, from the inside and the out together, she

can decipher nothing from the series of thumps and flutters which

is a disappointment -- she has always considered herself intuitive.



She bends to fix the rain gauge in the ground but the black earth

has tuned gray and impenetrable.

Finally she wedges the plastic spike into a crack and the dirt

that does give turns to powder.

She stands too fast and the garden spins and darkens.

How will she push this baby out into the world when the time

comes, she worries, her strength is already dried up.



The thunderstorms predicted for the end of the week are purely

theoretical.

She walks back toward the faucet in slow motion, trying to 

remember how it all begins -- a few clouds building up out of

nowhere, the first drops smelling sweetly of dust.

Everything will do better after a good, long rain.

BIOLOGICAL TRUTHS

The woman on the wall maps out in bloodless detail

fetal development, labor, and delivery.

Inside her distended belly, which is sliced quite in half,

a tiny fetus crouches, genderless and curiously whole.

Without a head or hands, with only a single utilitarian breast,

she offers little reassurance and no wisdom to the succession

of women waiting in paper gowns for the doctor.

The pain she fails to address turns out to be real as rock

and more than a body can contain.

It knocks the nurses back a great distance

and leaves only a husband's live hand and disembodied voice

counting steadily one breath for each ceiling tile up the room

and down and back up again.

It is not that a woman simply forgets afterwards;

that her feminine arms, having never performed

a complete chin-up or thrown a ball with authority,

must first set down the pain, lightly and entirely,

before reaching for her infant,

It's that there's little connection between labor

and the soft, almost boneless body someone hands her,

wrapped into form by a flannel sheet imprinted with ducks;

little connection between the woman on the wall,

perpetually pregnant,

or even the journey through the pelvis cameoed below her

and the sudden pause of the world when,

for the first time, she hugs to her heart

with thin and shaking arms her damp-haired, newborn child.

WORDS

Write me words as true 

as the morning glories we planted 

from a pack of free seeds

from that gas station down in Indiana.

They never did learn to climb the trees in back

so they tangle themselves through the grass 

that we've had to keep long.

Such simple blossoms really, 

their petals fused 

almost seamlessly

around a blue so pure and haunting 

it pulses

in the morning shadows.

Sometimes our neighbor

steps through the dew

to lose herself

in such color

and we wonder together

how something this compelling

could fall out of fashion

simply because 

it grows

like a weed.

COMMON GRACE

The city hasn't room for snow

and yet, tonight, in large and lovely flakes

seen mostly in the movies and in memories

it tumbles toward the salted walks and streets.



All the way from heaven it spills,

the snow with its cold sweet hands,

filling the air,

tracing the fire escapes,

easing the sorrow of the paved-over earth

   still dreaming but ever so faintly.



The alleys, the dumpsters

abandoned cars, crooked porches

drawbridge stations, the sluggish river

brick and steel and trees that will never prosper,

the snow, falling true in the twilight,

remembers it all,

twirls before the lights of the taxis.



In the train shed

fourteen parallel curtains of snow,

flowing through the slits in the roof,

bless, however briefly, the muddy tracks below.

Faith Van Alten Lee writes and practices motherhood, gardening and swat-team avoidance in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Dialogue, The Writers' Guild Anthology and The Literacy Club Newsletter.

[ Poems copyright © 2000 Faith Van Alten Lee. All rights reserved. ]

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