Back again

A perfect winter day, a baby who is alternately happy and sleepy, a relatively clean house, lots of time to write and reflect. Is this a dream? I know better than to get used to it, but I can't help but feel for this one little moment like I have it all figured out: I can mother, I can write, I can rock, I can have a good time.

I've posted today far more than I have in a week but wanted to check in one last time before I am off to the movies to share a poem I've been coming back to again and again in these past months. When I talk to my friends, I am sometimes apologetic about how much motherhood has changed me. To them, I want to be the same as I always was (only better maybe), but inside I feel completely new and different. Less exciting in the ways I used to be exciting, but bigger, more triumphant in new ways. I want to tell the story of Clementine again and again, even if you've heard it before. I don't care. I have never done something this huge with my life, this unchangeable and wonderful and terrible and amazing.


THE LANGUAGE OF THE BRAG
by Sharon Olds

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.