Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Child's Pose



 
After I fed you at 6:30 this morning I sneaked out of the house in my pajamas, scraped the glitter of ice off the windshield in the dark, and drove to Blue Monday.  Hands around a warm mug I tried to make sense of the dates of spring semester. Numbers trickled down the page.  Poetry before nonfiction? Two days on images or one?  Should the peer critiques be one page or two?  Brain fumbling around.  Like trying to make a peanut butter sandwich with mittens on.

Back home by 8:45 and Thisbe was fever-less but watery-eyed and pale.   Daddy was leaning against the wall in the kitchen, dapper in cords and sweater and collared shirt, watching her spoon cereal (three kinds mixed together) into her mouth.  You were upstairs crying, not napping.  So unlike you.  You who are the dependable sleeper.  So Daddy took Thiz to school and I put you in your car seat and drove.  Past neat green signs saying Cannon River and Fairbault and Farmington.  Past ice on the road turned to metal in the sun.  Past the Malt-o-Meal factory puffing and cars puffing, gasps of white out of everything that wants to be living.  Past Arby's and Target and an eye clinic; Greenvale school and a glass store and the vet's office.  Variations on Hayden filling the car.


Then yoga.  The warm (WARM!) room.  Babies laid at the end of yoga mats like plump offerings.  Your heel cupped in my palm.  My hands gently wringing your thighs.  Your fingers around my hair, pulling, while I leaned back into my haunches in child's pose.  The press of Cassie's warm hands on my lower back.  Songs about rivers and children and earth.  One of the babies so new she looked almost skeletal, like a kind of fish that lives without light.  And your sounds over the top of all of it, mewls and grunts and groans and ohhhhs.  I didn't realize you were so vocal (how could you be next to your sister?) until, beside the younger babes, you made yourself known over and over again.

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