BOOM!
For Melody, Phoenix, Summer and Willow
BOOM!
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
57 Nolton Street, Bridgend,Wales, CF31 3AE
www.serenbooks.com
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Twitter:@SerenBooks
The right of Carolyn Jess-Cooke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
© Carolyn Jess-Cooke 2014
Author Website: www.carolynjesscooke.com.
ISBN: 978-1-78172-175-9
e-book: 978-1-78172-176-6
Kindle -978-1-78172-177-3
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.
Cover Photograph by Brooke Shaden.
Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd. Glasgow.
Contents
Boom!
I Phone You From the Sumo
Anonymous
The Days of the Ninth Month
Home Birth
The Right Ones
The Waking
The Lotteries
The Sadness
Parallelism
Red Stars
Different Water
Each Thing Observed Closer
Nights!
The Second Way to Skin a Cat
Motherhood Diptych
Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction
The Only Dad at Playgroup
Working Mother
Poem Made From Bits of Newspaper Headlines
Silence for Schumann
Staying at Home
Hare
Thetis
Speech Therapy Candidate
Daughtering
The Possessed
To a Zoopraxiscope
What Matters
Children of the Bullied
Sleep Training
Instrument
Planet
Honour Thy Parents
My Father’s Mother
Puppy
Breaking My Father
Still Life,With Family
Belfast Murmuration
The Fourth Child
What We Talk About When We Talk About Motherhood
Clay
In Joy I Have Asked Questions
One Hundred Years After the Suffragettes
Life Questions
The Mire
Weft
The Lessons
In the Hands of an Orange Sun
Mother Tongue
All Right
Acknowledgements
‘Nothing is lost, nothing created: everything is transformed.’
– Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Elements of Chemistry (1789)
Boom!
There was this baby who thought she was a hand grenade.
She appeared one day in the centre of our marriage
– or at least in the spot where all the elements of our union
appeared to orbit –
and kept threatening to explode, emitting endless alarm-sounds
that were difficult to decode.
On the ridge of threat, we had two options.
One was attempt to make it to the bottom
of the crevice slowly, purposively, holding hands. The other
was see how long we could stand there philosophizing
that when she finally went off we’d be able to take it.
But then the baby who believed she was a hand grenade
was joined in number: several more such devices entered
our lives.
We held on, expecting each day to be our last. We did not let go.
As you might expect, she blew us to smithereens.
We survived, but in a different state: you became
organized, I discovered patience, shrapnel soldered the parts
of us
that hadn’t quite fit together before. Sometimes when I speak
it’s your words that come out of my mouth.
I Phone You From the Sumo
I had a seat close enough to see the buttocks
of the largest wrestler wearing a blue mawashi
and the waterfall of flab all down his body
and it must have been right as he craned his
leg with the ease of a ballerina to ear-height
that I felt alone in a stadium of five hundred
in a city of forty million.
I watched
as time froze, as the scattered salt floated
above the dohyou, as one by one the spectators
blinked into nothingness and the streets emptied
until I was the only girl in Tokyo. On the line,
an echo meant that we talked over each other,
the freshness of our relationship palpable
in those awkward, tentative questions. How are you?
What’s the weather like? Does anyone speak English?
I had no idea that six months from then
we’d conceive a child, that we’d already be married
and the whole fragile dust matter of love
would grow bones, teeth, a pulse, an opinion.
Neither distraction nor distance nor curiosity filled
your absence. Imperceptibly,
and without any ado, this whole wide world had changed
its orbit to turn around you.
Anonymous
On the monitor
a sea at night.
Silver-edged squalls
toss, argue.
My bladder a white hull
seen from underwater.
The sac a lifeboat,
waves agitating at its sides.
A tiny survivor huddles there,
hazelnut
of rounded shoulders
and curled up legs
(too early for knees, she says).
Eight weeks and four days.
The heart insisting,
insisting,
candlelight shivering
on the far shore.
The Days of the Ninth Month
for Olivia Chapman
They are not days, they are cenotes
riven in eternity, raindrop
by raindrop,
wet troughs plunging gravity, bending physics –
month of centuries, month of drowning
in my own flesh, month of Joshua’s stopped sun
around my waist. Her due date sat fixed
on my Sainsbury’s calendar, I crawled through the squares of it,
beneath the photograph of quinoa and pancetta salad,
hefted my body through awful nights of pancaked lungs,
acidic gullet, punched sinus,
the crushed, corked pelvis,
and when someone inevitably chirped
not long now! That’s flown by!
when the teasing strands of yet another dawn
fingered through my curtains
how can I tell of the courage it took
to rut the fattened mole of myself
again and again in black soil, among root-tendrils,
riverbeds, bones, blunt arrow-heads, history of war,
to burrow through the month’s clotted walls –
as though I had to sow and aerate the day
of her birth in time’s soil
like something that had never before existed?
*Cenotes are natural sinkholes in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, products of the collapse of limestone bedrock.
Home Birth
They said she was stuck,
as though she was a nine-pound human fork
pronged in the dishwasher,
an umbrella that wouldn’t fold to size.
Stuck because my body had never given birth
so I pushed until I thought I’d turn inside out
and yet she sat in my cervix for hours,
heartbeat like a drum
as the contractions collapsed on me
like skyscrapers,
as they talked about the knife.
Second time round, the sour sensation
of complete idiocy
for willing this pain again, going through it,
risking so much for someone
ghosted by awful wisdom
that birth isn’t the end of it, nor the worst –
episiotomy; infections; afterpains; breastfeeding.
But my body remembered,
it took the first shunt of his head, yawned, then
toboganned him out in a gush of brine,
red as a crab. I remember his arms
like a sock full of eggs, muscular, fists bunched,
as though he’d been prepared to fight.
The Right Ones
The child is laid creaturely in the clear basket,
human ruby, surrendered arms. The not-yet-eyes.
The antenatal group laid out what comes next:
a maternal bond ensures you will recognise
the parent in your own skin. Follow your instincts!
You wait. Another certainty arrives in lieu –
the right ones will come and claim this
foreign jewel someone entrusted to you.
The Waking
Those first few days every part of her wakened,
the seedling eyes stirred by sunlight, tight fists
clamped to her chest like a medieval knight
and slowly loosening, as if the metal hands
were reminded of their likeness to petals
by the flowing hours. Her colours, too,
rose up like disturbed oils in a lake, pooling
through the birth-tinge into human shades,
her ink eyes lightening to an ancestral blue.
The scurf and residue of me on her scalp floated
easily as a pollen from the sweet grass of her hair.
She reminded me of a fern, each morning more
unfurled, the frond-limbs edging away from her
heart, the wide leaves of her face spread to catch
my gaze. Once, I saw the white down of her skin
cloud in my hands, the cream ridges of her nails
drift like crescent moons, the thick blue rope
she had used to descend me tossed like a stone,
as though she was finally free.
The Lotteries
The nature of luck changes, too.
In the two-week window between ovulation and a test
that will say ‘no’ when the body holds its ‘yes’ in secret
you read books, pamphlets, websites that bring to light
that the odds of conceiving on the first try
are up there with being swallowed whole by a shark
or kidnapped by terrorists, that each month yields a two-day
chance
and even then, it may take a solid year of trying, and
when the small white square shores up a second line
luck is against you, with one in four of every such lines
ending in miscarriage, particularly during weeks five and seven
which is when you barely move or sleep,
and when the nausea hits – more violent than any other,
toes to scalp –
someone mentions that this is lucky.
In the widening span of nine months, more luck unfurls –
lucky that the day-and-night sickness lasts only three months.
Lucky that the first scan shows a heartbeat, the second, health,
lucky that the withering anaemia subsides
with pills (and the constipation isn’t chronic),
lucky that the pelvic condition isn’t eclampsia,
lucky that this is your first baby and so you can rest,
lucky to live in a first world country, blessed by the NHS.
And when thousands of such mines are dodged
you are lucky to survive the birth. Many have not.
You are lucky that the child survives, and when the bleeding
won’t stop
you are lucky, again, incalculably lucky,
and you return home, under the gold light of luck,
cornucopia of blessings:
clean water, a cot, infant-friendly bedding,
and when you are not lucky
with breastfeeding – not such a simple act of nature,
it turns out –
you are lucky that the baby takes to the bottle easily,
you are lucky when she sleeps four hours’ straight,
you are lucky that Tesco delivers,
you are lucky when toast can be eaten before it is stone cold,
you are lucky to have a shower before 3 pm,
you are lucky that maternity leave is four weeks at full pay,
you are lucky when the stitches heal, the bleeding slows,
you are lucky to find her each morning still alive, pierced
by the knowledge
that somewhere out there, some other child has not woken –
and so the world goes on opening its many bright hands
of luck
and when you say thank you
the lanterns of mercy ascend to black skies,
changing the nature of night.
The Sadness
The sadness that sometimes closes in after giving birth
is a collar of storm choking that summer’s afternoon.
kingly presence, potent in an asking way.
Brimful of too-dark thoughts, body’s soupy overflow of nurture.
The sadness that makes a new mother stare, November-ish.
A film in which everything is falling. O what a falling off...
Sadness that fattens on knowledge of all that ought
to be enjoyed and celebrated, but can’t, can’t. Sadness
that renders everything too much, too loud,
withering. Blank as rockface,
each day tunneling into the next. Looping questions.
A smothering sadness. Bitter harvest,
bounty of wormy fruit.
The sadness that is sunlight visiting ice,
too shy for blaze.The floes of her nose their hooded-woes,
drowning her for the thousandth time.
Parallelism
I hid from Depression
it found me
I went incognito
Depression spied me
I ate Depression
it tasted like ashes
I ran from Depression
I got cramp
I tried to reason with Depression
it fell asleep
I rugby-tackled Depression
and fell on my face
I flattered Depression
it saw right through me
I bolted Depression in a steel box
it slipped out like mist
I said, not in front of the children
it gnawed while I played
I laughed at Depression
it echoed me
I tried to predict Depression
it changed shape
I masked Depression
it loved every minute
I played upbeat music
Depression talked louder
I took Depression to the beach
; it clothed me in shadow
I slept through Depression
it stalked my dreams
I waited for Depression to leave
and I waited, and waited
I tried to forget Depression
it bought shares in remembrance
I supplicated Depression
no offering was enough
I cried at Depression
it bathed in my tears
I asked Depression what it wanted
silence answered
I tried to understand Depression
and was instantly confused
I challenged Depression to a duel
it said, we share a heart
When Depression left, a note read
I will be back
Red Stars
For time did not exist until she was born, nor elephants
nor raspberries nor the inner smoothness of the scallop,
for there were no words, neither was there language,
thus music was not yet conceived, the harp and drum
being things of fancy. It is she who has created the notion
of juiciness in this world, and ripeness too, her own species
of four-month-old deliciousness bringing life to the cherry
tart and chocolate flan, flooding the world with flavour.
Feather of swan, grace and delight of the prodigious swallow,
persuasion of snow on the silent path – none would
bear their weight against this world were it not for her.
So too would the menacing asterisk of the house spider
beg deletion, the guttural pigeon and bobbling bumblebee
prompt thoughtless swipes without the want she conjures
for all things to live and go on living in the kind of purpose
only she defines. Because of her the simple is no more;
there is only complexity, the body’s machinery and
the soul’s still pond shining back in the mirror where
once there was merely a face, some scars. Frightening,
too, that without her the cruel and vulgar would hitherto
be excused, the delicate and sacred would forever be
unsavoured, and that October’s grievous glug of leaves
in our gutters might never have revealed themselves
to be red stars, yes, red stars that spin along the overspill
to the drains where my darling’s breath determines there
to be nothing but hope, and life, and plenty. For she is
here, and she lives, and may it always be so.