(no subject)

Sep 23, 2007 22:38

You can be anywhere, just promise you'll be breathing.

---

I dreamt of you with a hand pressed hard against
my abdomen, not seeing you but feeling
you move inside of me - contractions
at your every touch. Before I felt your hardness
through the softness of my belly,

you were just the anticipation of sound. I listened
for the swallowing of religious invocations
against the hollow of my neck; I
know you’ve seen god there before, tapped him
Morse Code messages through my pulse. You may have
secrets from me, but that is not one of them. And

when we separated, I dreamt of leaving
you in other rooms with thin walls and listening
for your voice; I tip-toed in high heels
to hear you crying for the safe place in my stomach and
my wetness and my warmth and it never

and it never came. I pressed my fingers harder
against the smoothness of skin between my
belly button and everything below it and there was
nothing but the memory of you there. I dreamt
of you and never really saw you - just felt you as a

ripple and then as an absence of noise
everywhere I went.

---

I had a dream last night, and turned it into something else. I dreamt there was a baby, my baby, and I felt it move inside of me and there were contractions and I was alone, so I just pressed my hands against my stomach and felt everything moving and hoping it was all right. But it didn't cry, and babies are supposed to cry. That's how you know they're okay. And I left it in different rooms and walked away and listened, the entire dream, to hear it cry, and it never did. There were people around, and they all wanted to see the baby, but I was just waiting for it to be alive, and it never was.

And I never saw the baby through the entire dream. I just felt it, first as movement inside of me, and then as an absence of noise following me everywhere I went. It was... so much sadder than I can explain. And I woke up with cramps where the contractions were, and this feeling of loss. Like something that was part of me was dead, and I was grieving.

It was the phone that woke me, and my mother's voice, but she knew that I was half asleep and told me to call her in the morning, so I did. And before she even said anything, I thought of the dream. And I had turned it into something else, turned it into a poem about the only person I ever really write about, but all I needed to hear was silence on the other end and I thought, yeah. My baby's dead. I know.

It's not the words that break your heart so much as the lack of them. I've said a lot and heard a lot and in the end, it's silence that keeps me awake at three am.
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