#the long devotion

I. When She Takes My Body into Her Body ...From her bassinet she wakes with a squall, her mouth impossibly huge, her tongue aquiver with anger the baby book says she doesn't have, aquiver like the clapper of a bell. Her passion I wasn't prepared for, her need... No one ever mentioned she's out for blood. I wince as she tugs milk from ducts all the way to my armpits... Let me get it right so I remember: Once, I bared my chest and found an animal. Once, I was delicious... II. First Night Away from Claire ...I'm near-drunk from my first beer in months. We've got a babysitter, a hotel room, and on the horizon a meteor shower promised. We've planned slow sex, sky watch, long sleep. His hand feels good on my lower back... We're tired. We fall asleep. I wake predawn from pain. Those meteors we were too tired to watch-- it will be thirty years before they pass this way again. III. After Weaning, My Breasts Resume Their Lives as Glamour Girls ...Aren't you glad? he asks, glad, watching me unwrap bras tissue-thin and decorative from the tissue of my old life, watching, worshipfully, the breasts resettle as I fasten his red favorite-- Aren't you glad? He's walking toward them, addressing them, it seems-- but, Darling, they can't answer, poured back into their old mold, muffled beneath these lovely laces, relearning how it feels, seen and not heard. IV. It Was a Strange Country where I lived with my daughter while I fed her from my body. It was a small country, an island for two, and there were things we couldn't bring with us, like her father. He watched from the far shore, well meaning, useless. Sometimes I asked  for a glass of water, so he had something to give.... We didn't get many tourists, much news-- behind the closed curtains, rocking in the chair, the world was a rumor all summer. All autumn.... ...Soon, the milk stops simmering and the child forgets the mother's taste, so the motherland recedes on the horizon, a kindness--we return to it only at death.

Please     forage   please do not     achieve please stay      mischievous even     if       others are deviously perfect

Sometimes I want to crack their illusions open because they are the illusions of the carefree.... ...If all goes as planned, when they  undo the ribbon on the Pandora box of adulthood, they'll only see smiles and low interest rates. That's what I came here to do. I still can't wait to hear about their failures, though. I'll lean in to their face and eat every word as if they were my last breaths.

...I need the baby to take a nap     I need the baby to not need me        I never meant to be so needed                                                                  I dream about drifting             alone     I can't quiet my ambition It bats at my knees and I toss it scraps...

Bees ricochet in and out of the clustered petals, and my sons panic and dash and I tell them about good insects, pollination, but the truth is I want their fear-box full of bees. This morning the radio said tender age shelters. This morning the glaciers are retreating.