Haibun: Well Baby Clinic

The sea, I mean. If you walk out into
its maw without thought, you will die.
I don’t care what kind
of swimmer you are—and it’s the same
with children. I was one, and then
I had one. What else to do? There’s too much
pain for mastery, but it does make the work
better. It makes the self more evident
in the work when you’re gulped-down
breastmilk in other spheres. That’s how
tits get to be like eyes. Down-
cast. It’s not there’s not
great joy in being
consumed. And of course the pleasure.
For example: I like a fried plantain
on occasion, the sweet and fat,
the salt of it. Babies can be like that
—managing to live. Later tastes evolve, pigment
pools into bruised cloud. You see the
fingerprints there? That’s holding become
shaking, love unvarnished. There be
oceans in the skies ready to pull you
dry. And all the ones you were
assured would survive this place—
its greedy mouths—they keep looking black.

(Alice Neel)

I can say it now. My abortion. I have practiced saying it, in French—m’abortion. It is a thing my mother never said to my father. A secret she has kept for me.

So he would not be ashamed. Because she was.

My mother had her children. All of them, then others’. She believes it a virtue: playing the hand dealt. Certainly she had already left the church. Things we don’t leave marks.

A litany is a commitment of saying. Asylums of m’mory. Kubla Khan, Carrion Comfort, Casabianca. Some sonnets. Stanzas. Jabberwocky.

No daughterets. How many lines would they have? How many syllables? Vorpal swords? I will never know.

You could call such a poem Echo. It could produce only what was done to it, or less.