Fever 103

It's later than I like to stay up these days, but I can't sleep, floating from my bed to the computer or the bookshelf while Clementine sleeps fevered in her bed. I'm remembering symptoms, quelling new worries (was she pointing to her right side when she said "Owie," and does that indicate appendix?) and realizing I can be a little histrionic. I know she just has a fever, but she seems so unlike herself, so uncomfortable, and I feel like I need to be awake, hovering, waiting for her to wake and need me. I want to comfort her, to soothe her.

This trip up is because I can't stop reciting a line from "Fever 103" by Sylvia Plath: "I have been flickering, off, on, off, on." I need to find the rest of the poem to read it, and I'm taking that as a good sign. When we brought Clementine home I kept Plath's Ariel beside the bed and read it constantly with new eyes as I pumped or when I would wake in the middle of the night to rock her back to sleep. I'd like to say I was learning something about poetry or motherhood from the experience, and I suppose I wouldn't be lying if I did. But mostly I was looking to the book to reassure me that motherhood didn't mean the end of my poetry, that I could still write in the face of such a consumption. Perhaps Plath wasn't the best place to look for that, but the blame is all mine: I have written only a few poems since Clementine, and not one is something I'd show anyone. I tell myself it's hard to write from a place of such contentment, but that's as big a lie as any (for if we are going to get into the argument that poetry is inspired by isolation, fear, anger, etc., what better inspiration than motherhood?). I just don't have anything left for the page right now. I hope it will change, that I will change it. I hope needing to read Plath in the middle of the night is a start, but I don't know how one can balance this much: work, parenting, social connections, an artistic life.

I was thinking about this last night at a Lucinda Williams concert that is worth it's own post (along with a post about the talent show the night before held in my working class/redneck town in conjunction with the contemporary arts museum downtown--a whole post I hope I'll make time to write). Lucinda was singing about making a little something to eat; it was a solitary, searching activity in the song and isn't even the refrain, but I felt the world screech to a halt a little while she sang about it. I can't remember a time I put that much thought (and really it was just a few lines of the song) into what to eat myself. I certainly can't remember a time when that deliberation, that act could then be a part of a mood, a feeling I wanted to communicate in a poem. I can't accurately describe what the hell I'm actually thinking about, but as I listened to her I realized I will not be on my own that way again for a long time, if ever. That restlessness, that attention to every whim and mood, that ability to connect small decisions to larger existential struggles is something I don't have time for anymore. What the hell kind of poet am I, I wondered to myself, that I can't make it the center of my world? That's the only way to be successful, right? Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, even my friend Crystal: poetry comes first. Lucinda too.

But then I remembered Clementine, the things that are the center of my world, and I was OK. Better than OK. Sure, Nate would have been with me at the concert had C. not puked her guts out as we were leaving (is that parenting or what?). Sure, I wilt a little when a writer friend of mine gets a prize, publishes another book. I didn't know this would be my path, my happiness. I didn't know I would stray from writing, but I have. I don't know when I'll go back, but the hope is alive. Ultimately this is the life I want, the life I choose every day. Clementine is wheezing in the next room, her hot little body restless and wandering under the covers, and in a few hours she will nestle between me and Nate in bed. But I know she'll be OK. I'm going to read one more poem (which was one I obsessed over when we were first home with her and the one I read at her faux baptism) and then go get ready for her. This is what I want to be doing.