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.
No comments:
Post a Comment