“Waterwings”

I haven’t had a lot to offer lately. Honestly, by this point (T-Rexy is 16 days old), I was hoping I’d have the two kid thing down and feel like a champ and have a brain full of wonderful blogging ideas.

Truth? I have another infection. It’s not mastitis, PTL. (PTL is code for “Praise the Lord,” fyi.) But it’s made me icky and frustrated. I just want to jump back into normal life and be a functioning member of society (or at least of blogging society), who doesn’t need to nap my life away.

But, until then, I’m posting this and going to bed at 8:30. Here it is, one of the first poems I ever really loved. It just so happens to be about a mother and her boy:

Waterwings
by Cathy Song

The mornings are his,
blue and white
like the tablecloth at breakfast.
He’s happy in the house,
a sweep of the spoon
brings the birds under his chair.
He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,
he draws a circle.
it is his hundreth dragonfly.
Calling for more paper,
this one is red-winged
and like the others,
he wills it to fly, simply
by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,
the floats I strap to his arms.
I wear an apron of concern,
sweep the morning of birds.
To the water he returns,
plunging where it’s cold,
moving and squealing into sunlight.
The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles
his small body makes
fan and ripple,
disperse like an echo
into the sum of water, light and air.
His imprint on the water
has but a brief lifespan,
the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,
the morning he will not remember
that he and beauty were aligned,
skimming across the water, nearly airborne,
on his first solo flight.
I’ll write “how he could not
contain his delight.”
At the other end,
in another time frame,
he waits for me–
having already outdistanced this body,
the one that slipped from me like a fish,
floating, free of itself.

-from Frameless Windows, Squares of Light by Cathy Song