New Baby: Cesarean Novena Day One

sundial
Fruitlands Museum
Harvard, MA

New Baby: Cesarean
Novena: Day One

It’s later that we’d come to know

how sick she was and from

the place they cut you and the end

of what remained that today

I imagine as the severed head

of the Hydra, and how

once lopped and soft in the tray

the head itself lay still

but in its place something crimson

grew and chewed its way through

the burned ends of her tubes

and scratched at where

the uterus was and against the feminine

blood and up into the colon.  But

that would be years making itself

and when you were brand new

and nothing was said of you

except here’s your brother

they put our mother to bed sicker

than they knew, bleeding

and bleeding rot and exhaustion.

It stole from you (though none of us

knew her that either either, but for different

reasons) those days she may have lain

close to you, those days she may have

held you, those days you didn’t

have to cry and cry and cry

yourself to sleep aching the way only

abandoned babies can ache.  Explaining

makes it clear but not

clean, marked like you were

by it from the start.  Like we all were

left wet and blistered

and I’d stand to look at you

through the slats of your crib

(how they made it seem

like you were in prison) maybe

I imagine I look at you because I

was not supposed to be out

of bed and I was only two

and a half and our grandmother

(our mother’s mother) had

hurt me or left me to be hurt

and it was my other grandmother

who came to discover

that I couldn’t walk and I was

told to tell I got my foot caught

in the old tricycle

but it didn’t happen

that way it was something

rough and deliberate

but I must’ve limped to you

and looked in on you

and smelled the baby

you were and the pee

and the rubber sheets and you

maybe gazed at me

I don’t know, maybe

being awake and unswaddled

(my mother didn’t believe

in swaddling she said

later) and it was

the smell in the crib

that made me reach for you

and doesn’t every kid

know that smell and won’t she

be furious so furious

I wanted to hide it for you

to make you glad

again and dry because

you were on the edge

of crying you were

and you’d wake her up

and she’d be swinging

and maybe I said

shhhhh baby, shhhhh baby

and blew you little kisses

through the cage.