This Morning I Carry
Tantrum
Preschool Holiday
Vera Pavlova, the Russian poet who said her poetry and her milk came in at the same time: in the maternity ward. A story heaped & picturesque like roadside oranges for sale.
This is why it is wrong for one mother to tell another: birth is a nightmare. Why it is wrong for a mother to say: nursing is entirely lovely—you can stop whenever you want to stop. This is why there is no currency for babies: they are bad coins. No body is sound. Every day you must consult the white boards outside the shops and see where the ruble is at, where the dollar, where the baby, where the mother’s tender abs.
In the end we are all setting milk and bread out for the children; providing, providing while they sleep—flicking off the still-hot oven, lowering the lights in the house.
You are upstairs crying infant tears
your anger rains down the roof
little Euripidean
I wait for the shuddering of the kitchen
window, the buckle of floorboards
it’s one way for a house to fall
My hair is widow’s hair, dark and
peaked, I can only write my own
pain, and pay with years for these words
Upstairs, your crying quiets,
the dryer tumbles its clothes
Beren, five years, asks to cuddle. I lift up my arm like a wing in response. I am reading a reprint of Diving Into the Wreck. The words begin to sing to us. We talk about the scuba diver’s mask—it pumps our blood with power. His head leans in. He is content to listen, adrift in the plankton bloom of sound. His fingers stroke my hand as Rich pulls her reader, rung by rung, into the opaque ocean. Crenelated beings swim and dodge around us. The ribs of a sunken ship loom and I wonder if my fellow sailor can see it. The poem ends. What is a myth? I ask. It is—something like a legend, he says. His examples of myth are awake with dragons. Every morning, he is a new kind of dragon.
Hannah lives and teaches in Durham, NC. She has her MFA from GMU and is currently at Duke University writing her dissertation on gender and collaboration poetics in the seventeenth century. You can read her poems in Measure, 111O, So to Speak, Ruminate, and elsewhere. Twitter: @hmvanderhart.
