In Russian

чижик пыжик где ты был

до того как был

откуда                  впрыгнул

как это                   из меня

на УЗИ смешно-престрашном был светло горящий

не желавший быть «тобой»

а потом                

в недолгих руках моих –  голубая курточка  – кудри – что это?

ты был                                 уже                        маленький

   нормальная жизнь: да, да, купила я тебя в магазине

и тело мое населено паразитами крылатами  генами бородатыми

подсчитано и подписано

ну а с другой стороны
мастер, полный силы, свил твои тугие жилы и млат, и сват, и святой Блэйк

но если и то неправда
и это

то 

боже мой 
чижик мой

Thursday Market

The only mountain in this whole region:

the pregnant mama at a farmer’s market.

Her veiny vines touch the past and future.

She, Lilith, scoffs at the small, clean tables,

the short-lived peaches, the swollen squashes.

She revels in her laughing stature;

to hell with pale plums, and stressed-out peaches.

The fruitless eggplants rise up—but quiver.

Inane Chicago, you are Atlantis.

Skyscrapers, like so many corn cobs,

collapse and crack by her mammoth toes.

She drinks the lake and naps in the prairie.

The pregnant mama is just pretending.

She wears a planet, and feels its pulling,

its almost-falling, its fruit, so different

from sterile apples grown for urban hippies.

The fruit is born, but to be birthed yet;

the human tree does not know its children.

The pregnant mama is a child, spellbound,

and walks through ages, through distant orchards,

and climbs the world’s tree for a simple cherry,

and feels it ripen into a globe.

Shelled

Adults play at being each other,

prepare elaborate camouflage.

“Look! I’m wearing your face!”

But to play that sport with you, 

who knew the taste of my anxiety,

heard my machinery louder than me?

Small You?

And without the games? I didn’t know how.

The furrowed sovereignty of your face.

The needles that pricked you your whole one-week life.

Your separateness: a tsunami. 

No masks were left – the only face before me was yours.

And your otherness was opaque.

Once a fish in my belly, a giddy pet

who did laps, you now howled. 

Sorrow? Loneliness? Soreness?

Why didn't you come with a radar?

So I looked at you through a tunnel:

breast pump tubing, rolled blankie, a binkie

crooked and pipe-like in your mouth.

You wailed, I carried you, hunted

for you, four a.m., and I circled,

and you wailed, miles away from my body,

a warm paperweight, you doubted, I faked it,

and we paced, and we waited

for each other to land,

till I walked into stupor;

you, into separate sleep.

Rocking Chair

Where a mortal mom

feeds baby-baby.

Where she rushes

past charred snow,

numb coat,

towards cherries.

Where droplets drop.

Where each swallow

draws a circle

‘round the air that does not hear.

So she also doesn’t fear.

Where the quick quick, take cover,

dear reader.

Where

she’d bought some tix

to traverse the Styx,

but plans

to exit at the secret stop

the one past the terminal.

If

she doesn’t miss the boat.

Gestures

Unbuttoning a man’s shirt,

your hands grow girly, careful. A methodical –

metaphysical? – awe for what’s on the other side.

Your fingers unfurl the fabric, puppeteer-like,

slow-dance with the last button. Dinner was fine,

you got straight A’s in beef, and now it’s time

for delicious blue air that flakes, filters in

to greet the tough panorama of someone’s chest.

  

Buttoning a one-year-old’s shirt for the night,

you know there’s no time, none left in the world.

So it must be a cowboy shirt. Tuck it in-

to small jeans. There’s a man: watch him grin;

were you grinning yourself? With such panic you love

whatever temporal overlap you two will have.

What grins may come…

How do gestures birth men? And such solid ones,

golden-hued, singing softly in the crib.

No time, risking with every split

decision to not get it right.

You stumble into the bedroom, to the only person awake

at this hour, kiss him with an open mouth, into an open time.

Outside, every phantom of a wobbling night

is blue, every bit of it dyed.

Heartbeat

To hear our baby,

we go to a room plastered with pictures

of women’s internal organs.

They look like a color-coded salad:

a seedless red uterus sidled up to curly parsley,

but the parsley ran away with the vagina.

Then the doctor came out from behind a giant Asian cabbage

and started the fetal heart monitor.

To see our baby,

we consult a bearded wizard.

The ultrasound is a box

powered by tiny bearded men

who make little boys beat down on glass anvils

with tiny glass hammers

in order to take pictures.

And when our baby is born,

immaculate specialists

at Providence Hospital

will teach us how to kiss him.

The unborn child lives in the world.

The closer we get

to him, the less real it seems:

that a smallness shines

in the dark,

that it – he – feels and hears

us.

That in a couple of years

he will tell us

how he feels

about all this.

During Baby After

1

During Baby After

As the hermit crab grows in size, it has to find

a larger shell and abandon the previous one.

—Wikipedia

The baby’s asleep,

no longer lit

by her, but by a night light

in the shape of a turtle.

In a separate world,

the turtle projects stars.

Does the child know she loves him?

Does she know she loves him?

A ray stretches lazily, bluely,

across the dresser.

A starved star, strayed.

She nods in rhythm,

holding out for our heartbeat,

like in the labor unit.

May she forget, fog up

our animal mind.

You made a baby, she mutely says.

you should be pleased,

a vast part of you lost.