Happy birthday, Plum.
(After I retrieve some photos of her party from my dad's IPhone camera - very nifty, it is - I might just post them.)
This year has been my hardest yet, and that is absolutely no exaggeration. I often feel like a stranger to myself, like the old girl isn't home, isn't inhabiting that space any longer. I fear death, my own mortality, because of a terror that I haven't been perfect, that I haven't always shown love when I've wanted to. I am learning the importance of being compassionate with myself. Now is the time for compassion.
We finally decided on Eleonora's second middle name a few months ago. All of our children have four names, and all of their names came fairly simply, except for hers. Well, that's not true. Plumbago, I knew from the start. I knew before I was pregnant. Before I knew she was going to be a girl, I just knew she was Plumbago, because, actually, I love to walk, and in San Antonio, you can always see the plumbagos growing alongside the Mexican bird of paradise, (that pride of Barbados) and the esperanzas. The lead blue petals weave through their shrubs almost all throughout the year. They are small and unassuming, but they are striking and they stay around. They do. I love how the word slips off of your tongue like a festival, a carnival. But Zach urged me (laughed at me?) to use it as a second name. Not as a first name.
We decided on Eleonora after a few days, and then teetered for months. It is my great aunt's name, and she has always gone by Noni. It wasn't on our "list", she was going to be Neve or Hazel, Annot (still one of my favorites), Elsbet (an homage to my great grandmother), or Zuri. But as some of you know, sometimes children are already named, in a way, and there isn't much to do about it. After she was born, I tried to conjure up the perfect second middle name, but nothing came. I mean, some names came, and we used them, but they never felt right. They felt manufactured, a bit.
Anyhow, we've settled on Maris, and it feels like her third name, which is always the goal, don't you think? When I was pregnant, some of my very dear friends planned a blessingway for me, and that day they introduced me to Mary Oliver. How could I have never read her before? So, Maris: for Mary, who in many ways, got me through this first year, through the last third of my pregnancy, through the early months of Plum's life. And Maris, because of the vastness of the ocean, with her mystery and rhythm and terrible power; Maris because of the poet who still writes there, by the water.
Dogfish
Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
Noni is a dream. I am just so glad she's here.
That's all I'm going to say about her.
If you'd like to click on over and watch her birth video, you sure can. Actually, maybe, what you can do, is go to youtube.com and type in Noni's Birth, and there you'll have it. Excuse my ineptness for the time being. Or perhaps that link will work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hW4u9arx6o
