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Cheryl Chaffin became a mother at forty. Besides single parenting, she teaches English, literature, and creative writing at Cabrillo College near Santa Cruz, California. She has learned that as human beings we are made to do what we most love, but it takes many ascents and descents to love with complete freedom and in the moment. Cheryl has an MFA from Goddard College and this year will begin doctoral studies in Literature and Philosophy with Union Institute & University. She is just completing her first volume of poems, Heat: Writing Early Motherhood, some of which are featured online with Muse-Pie Press.
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Cheryl Chaffin and son, Elias
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People visit, and I am shaken. |
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George Oppen |
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Between Us
We sit on the couch,
you with The Economist,
me with my novel,
the space between us wide.
Though our toes touch,
I see you through a mist.
Who are you? I don't
know anymore.
We have a child and everything else
is forgotten between us.
What was our shared life,
those nine months before his conception?
I cannot remember dating,
courtship, a bottle of wine,
dinners authored together.
Now you absorb news of the world,
and I, some other person's story,
our private narratives lost to silence.
We don't know how to be together yet
with that invisible sleeping child between us.
When we met I wanted to know your past,
to imagine your life before me.
We were old already, forty years,
eighty between us. What was your narrative?
I wanted to tell you mine. It would take a long time.
Then, our child,
the couch, print in our eyes.
From here your heart specks the horizon,
and my desire enormous and mute
leans, reaches, fingers through silence
towards you.
Crooked Picture
Angled on wall
used to be straight
Assisi
chapel tower
room with throw-open-shutters view
bed with twisted white sheets
Shallow bowls of spaghetti
on terrace
Two days deep in Italian lover
Etched black and white
juniper trees
earthen walls
tight intimate street
Leading to
Man with easel
who inked
crooked
shower of branches
smokey Umbrian sky
Love hard and long
fast like fallen rain
is all memory
my young son
laughs, toddles
pushes with delighted scrape
against wall
Makes crooked picture
of my life
Temporality
On the road
He sees cyclists
coming toward us.
He waves at their approach
Then cranes his neck and head
To watch them go.
Bye, he says now, bye.
I explain that we are going
One way, they, another
That when people move in
Opposite directions they see
One another, nearly touch, then
Lose contact again.
He waves to the airplane,
Then we lose its engine sound.
He points to the sky,
which is partially blue
then gray and heavy
with rain.
There is surface water in the gulch by the road
but farther on it is dry
mud and wet leaves.
All this coming and going
that saturates each moment.
Fire
My son stuck his finger in a candle flame
I watched him as if language did not exist
No command issued of my mouth
eyes fixed to his tiny hand
A thought flickered through my mind:
he will learn heat
He entered the center and withdrew
Bitter cry on his lips
I comforted him, immersed the burn in ice water,
kissed the blistering fingertip
That night applying ointment
questions dressed in guilt rushed in
I fielded my mind’s accusing
Instead recalled his decision to test,
slow healing, insane draw to heat
this painful act of learning
The Other Life
is the one I would be living
if I did not have a child.
I'd go to India,
graduate school,
not worry about a full-time job,
read fat novels, write a memoir.
The desire for this other life
hangs like a pendulum,
swings into consciousness
tips away again
into dark, what is not now lived.
Instead I watch a woman
arrange creme and purple stock
at a flower stand on Pacific Avenue
a man tunes his guitar
I sit alone
in this outdoor cafe
writing this poem.
Coming Home
My son emerges from the car
Crying, writhing in his father’s arms
awakened from sleep, 75 mile drive
How calamitous this transition
from one parent to the other
from one place to another
how unwilling he is
subject to his parents’ whims
our decisions and duties
I take him into my arms
Go to his room
He struggles, roars with tears, kicks
I release him
In the open place between my knees
He falls to the ground, wails, stands again
Ventures to the middle of the room
angry with abandonment
heavy with return
Then, calm
He asks for clean diaper and pajamas
I hold him with blanket, milk, stuffed dog
He asks for bed and, exhausted, sleeps
Wakes with joy
Notices the new rug on the floor
Dances to the voices of African women
Finds the toy train his uncle repaired
The world returns
What love and suffering this coming home
Late Night Visit
Where is the poem?
In the moment of
Tiredness,
Late night
Cat curled at feet
Child in bed
House quiet, dark
Clock tick
Refrigerator buzz
Student papers read
Clouded sky
Cool fall air
No lovers
My body
This heart,
This silence.
Prayer to Poetry
To honor everything
This urge, thirst, impulse for language
To engage in making sense
The red, yellow hue of feeling –
Even with one child
ubiquitous time given to his growing
This love-act of nurture –
the interior voice must emerge
If forgotten: dishonored,
If ignored: faithless to what this soul needs
If pushed aside,
reasoned away for routine concerns:
Anger, volcano of rage
Betrayal
Each day has to be a prayer to poetry
Each movement to imbibe this cup of life
Every second honor love --
knowledge of how to feed the heart
Vow
I vow
in this moment
not to raise my hand to my child.
I take refuge next to the bookshelf
in a quiet corner against the wall
breathe,
remember that vow
return to him
in the bathroom
where he waits
to regain my open heart.
Humility,
each day I renew my vow
as if never before taken,
remember that rage arises
when I do not expect it
think I’ve recovered,
I’m at peace,
equanimity a permanent fixture.
When I mistakenly believe this
..........I vow again,
lower my voice
hold harsh words
choose a new course of action.
Lost Love: To Leave the Book
The woman on the couch
Reading, stops as her child grows
Needs her, leaves the book –
Then books – attends her child’s
Conversation, his need to be seen.
This is for the child who recalls
His mother reading, who discovers
His own love of reading, remembers
the way his mother lightly held
A book in hand,
For the woman who
Gives up books for twenty
Years – a paragraph, a sentence,
An essay, a scene here and there,
This is for the loss she feels,
Diaspora of words, the way
She grieves for the book as a lover
Lost, her yearning to return.
Sister
For Sophie Scholl
There is the magnificent
Consciousness,
The woman who moves through
Time, who glimpses you from
Across a room and says,
I will never leave you.
She is the comrade,
The sister, the lover
With whom -- ear pressed
To song – you sing familiar words
In the night. When you
Part, kiss goodbye, sense each
Other’s eye where seeing
Is prohibited, you feel the
Slight breeze of your souls
Mixing. Always you are
Merged beyond what men tell you
is knowing.
Sisters in the lightless night
In the forest of snow and history
Find one another
Across the room,
glimpse, seeing, remember eyes
and the sun-soaked window
of our Being.
Collapse
When I breathe
Fire stirs inside
I will crumble
Flames consume me
collapse to pile of ash
What holds me back?
Willingly I’ll go
I’ve no fight
just this bright internal burn
not passion, but
exhaustion,
heavy industry churning in my chest
Want causation but cause is futile
Just this weighted lightness:
I’m dying, I’ll break down
there will be none left
so thin, attenuated
...........wafer
communion host
..........full of words
....................thirsty for silence
dying
Surprise, my humanity!
hand moves, there are fingers
child strokes my hair and face
An unfamiliar consciousness
Breathes me
Teaches class, puts child to bed,
Cooks, serves food
Nearly dead, then strangely alive
This moment
this rich, brief secret
Cloud, Fire, Ash
Childhood
No one explains that
Monsters are fears,
That real people look like that,
Torture, maim, eat others,
that the ghost is the dead,
her anguished moan
the throes of dying we hear.
And, the food chain:
how to explain survival
means eating the other?
The monkey eats the beetle,
the hunter eats the monkey,
who eats the hunter?
Now you are three years old and
lonely in your room.
Many times a night
you return –
sometimes with success,
sometimes not –
to your mother’s bed
where you knead your toes
into her soft, warm legs,
burrow down, tucked away from fear
while fitfully you sleep.
Whoever implied
childhood was
free of terror?
You hear words: war, fighting,
murder, kidnap.
There’s a dead bird
in the garden,
prostrate on winter grass, and
you want to know
what Auschwitz is.
What’s Asked of You
to enter the crucible
to burn from inside out
to capitulate to awe
induced by presence of the child
to die to the notion of a created self
to walk through nine circles
and witness the cremation pyre
to step in, singe
to not known how or when
one will recognize oneself
but to know that one
has happened upon truth
again
Because You Know Suffering
Nothing has ever looked so beautiful
As the dark triangle of those three gulls
In the sky
And the wind tussling pine boughs
Because through her has come a child
And now her hipbones are uneven
Under her right rib lives a fist of tension
Her arm numbs with tendonitis
she recalls the mere
four centimeters after two days’ work
the child blazed a crooked path inside
his black head stuck at the junction of
now and mother
lowdown lies the scar and underground
the thorny tissue in answer to incision
child’s portal to light and air
embodiment and perpetual hunger
the morning after his birth she was hungry
breakfast sat on a tray before her
baby screamed
she would eat first, then the baby
the doctor balked
you are no longer first, she instructed
in these three years the woman has fallen
from the axis of the world
to the underbelly of unfamiliar forces
that pull her by the hand and tell her how to live
if she is to survive
Waitress
Short dress
Paisley with cap sleeves
Red hair twisted
clipped at the back of her head,
..........how beautiful
the women contained in her
blue-aproned hips
her approach to table
wine glasses in hand,
bottle of red cradled in arm.
Such intimate knowledge
how to hold
and carry,
How to walk
At home in the world.
Hers is the certainty of welcome
bringing of alimentation
reminder to love
miracle of female
embodiment.
This Love
Oh, dear self
It’s you I love
And the sun on my skin and
Face, food and love with a man,
My appetites that keep me alive.
Don’t ask me to give them away
For a God I can’t see.
Rumi, you speak of some invisible
One
Here she is standing before the refrigerator
on a foggy day, closing the door
eating nothing
I’ll be dust in no time
And should fast if I want to feel
The raw, true essence.
Yes, and I was a woman and a man
And my body a dark kitchen, sooty with
Desire that wrestles my soul down.
Sometimes I forget and all I know is face paint
And gender, pretty clothes whose fabrics
Give cheap ecstasy. Love of words —
Ecstasy — and the name that goes with them,
This desire to abolish silence, go sightseeing,
Journey away from home.
Invisible one arises not when appetite
Subsides, but when in the hurricane of hunger,
Desire outrageous, word-hungry, man-devouring,
Insatiably love-struck. Nothing comes or everything
Pours forth, and I’ve gone missing to this love.
Body of a Woman
After reading the article
In The Boston Globe about the
Into their twenty- and thirty-year-olds—
their first divorces, for some
second marriages,
how divorce is no longer
a stigma, people want
emotional closeness in
their most intimate relationship—
I open to Neruda’s poem
.......“Body of a Woman.”
This then is the seduction
untouched in the columns of magazine
.........longing for skin on
.........Skin, to sink deep, deeper
.........In, and Neruda capitulating
To goblets of breast, roses
of the pubis, and (final vengeance of
The lover) love!
Passion, not a road to
Ambition,
Rather the bed a wild
Nest of sheets, covers
Thrown back, our souls
Bare, upright, brilliantly
.........exposed
Here throbs the love we want—
This grafting to and movement away
.........eternal closeness that
Never leaves the body, even as the body leaves
as the millennium turns
as we achingly mature
Wet Pages
My son in the bathtub
Me on the floor against pillows
Journal pages splattered with bath water
This is my writing time
I wipe the drops, they will dry
Dinner in the microwave
Friends in the kitchen with wine
It’s okay to be all these things –
Mother, winedrinker, cook, friend
Woman on the bathroom floor writing
Feet against the outside of the tub
Back against the wall
Half talking to my son
Half, then fully, writing this poem
The moment holds so many things
The drops are dry, now he plays
With vigor, new drops splatter again
Everything renewed, then old
The red Coppola in the glass
By my side almost gone
Where are the bubbles, he asks,
They’ve disintegrated
We run water, add more bubbles
Agitate the water
It’s quiet now, he pours water from cup to
Cup, plastic dinosaurs float
The poem flows, he sings
I sing
Disintegrate, he says, means
Kind of break apart
Getaway
Now I will stay home
I promise you after all these
Years of running around the globe
Airports and trains, planes and suitcases
Lines, waiting, cabs, hotels, and tours.
I’ve seen dust and smelled love,
Eaten questionable meat and bounced over potholed roads.
You can’t tell me anymore there is something
You want that isn’t here, now.
You’ll learn to love home and open your eyes
To the beauty in which you walk.
You are incredulous, aren’t you?
Have you awoken? See the beauty!
You don’t have to leave. There’s nowhere
To go. What you thought you wanted is gone.
There’s no desire. Feel how free you are.
Now you can.
You are.
Stay right here.
Stay home.
Poems Copyright © Cheryl Chaffin 2008
You are invited to contact the author at chaffinwriter@earthlink.net
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