The Watched Pot

is not boiling yet.

Momma-to-be is tired and does not have a lot to say right now. But if you want a great story of a family's new addition, you should go to http://andemmamakes5.blogspot.com/. Don't start at the first entry--go back for at least a few pages and start from there.

Daily Update

I'm off to yoga. My pass ran out last week so I THOUGHT that might be a sign--plus the dictionary.com word of the day is "ameliorate." Come on! But no--no baby yet.

Sagittarius For Monday, September 28

Whether you realize it or not, you're in the midst of some amazing changes right now. Trouble is that the most productive ones usually take the longest to complete. Luckily, if you keep your eyes and ears open today, you'll find a few sweet shortcuts that will help you skip all of the boring stuff and jump right to all the fun stuff. These shortcuts will require a heavy amount of bravado on your part, but if you know how to fake it 'til you make it, you'll be all set!

I've become interested in my horoscope these days. This one's pretty intriguing. Shortcuts? Hmm.

Single Digits

Do we notice that the little clicker says NINE DAYS?

The later I get in the pregnancy, the more my writing mind returns. I couldn't sleep, so I got up to write. And to drink chocolate milk. Maybe when the baby is here, I'll be super prolific?

No baby, but...

I just got a letter that The South Carolina Review is going to publish one of my poems!

Like Couldbank last spring, they sent the letter in the SASE I included with the submission. I guess even when you get in the journal, they don't see a reason not to use the stamp you provide.

That was a quick turnaround!

"I'm feeling scared but it's a good feeling!"

Thus exclaimed one of the kids in the pool the other day as his swimming instructor guided him and another boy into the deep end.

That's just how I feel!

DC has several pools throughout the city where residents can swim for free. I've been going to the pool a lot lately, 3 times this week. Lest you be unduly impressed, I mostly float. The floating seems to help the swelling in my feet and hands--my doctor told me take my wedding ring off last week. And it really helps my back. At our neighborhood pool, they allot about half of the pool for lanes and about half for just open water, where a variety of what seem mostly to be non-swimmers float, water walk, stand in the shallow end with arm weights, or hang onto the edge and kick. I have been one of their ranks for the past few weeks now. They are a friendly bunch, very non-judgmental.

The fun thing about floating is the people-watching. When I go in the mornings there is sometimes a water aerobics class in which mostly older, even elderly, people bop, kick and pump their arms to comically incongruous techno music. And the other afternoon I got to meet a gaggle of young girls in the locker room as they got ready for swim team practice. They were maybe 8-ish years old and were not shy about parading around completely naked or about openly staring at my belly.

Also, I have now twice been used as a biology lesson to toddlers, whose mothers, noting their child's wide-eyed peeks at my mid-section, explain, "She has a baby in her tummy!"

At this news the children always look somewhat doubtful and concerned.

So much for horoscopes

Yesterday was remarkably uneventful. I did get all of the rhetorical analysis projects graded for my classes, though, which is a grading world record.

Last night, during one of the few moments I actually slept, I dreamed the baby was home in her crib and I was seeing her for the first time, wondering when she had been born. I picked her up and she opened her eyes--she had pretty eyes--and took her to Dean, who explained to me when I had had her (I don't remember his explanation now, but it made sense at the time).

For Wednesday, September 23: Sagittarius

No baby yet. But I happened to read my horoscope this morning while scrolling through the Post headlines--soemthing I almost never do.

It begins

-Your dull routine won't seem so dull today -- the universe has a few surprises in store for you, and you are going to enjoy every single one of them!

Hmm. It continues:


So reach out and embrace all the chaos as it comes. After all, it isn't boring -- it is stimulating your mind in a brand-new way. If you get too anxious about how things are going to work out, you'll be putting yourself through emotional distress for no reason. Just roll with the unexpected reactions people have to your comments.

I have a lot of work planned for today--maybe I should get started early.

Five Facts for Monday Morning

I'm off to a doctors appointment in a few hours, and excited to get an update.

Here's a photo of the hallway nursery. You can't quite see them, but all of the baby's stuffed animal friends are inside, ready and waiting.



Here's the baby yesterday. She is getting pretty huge.




Here is a blue morning glory from seeds I planted long ago--I thought they were NEVER going to grow.



Also, I have blue toenails.





UPDATE: At the appointment I learned my cervix is 70% effaced and 1 and 1/2 cm dilated. Apparently this means little about WHEN the baby will come but COULD mean I am in for a relatively quick labor, which is great news to me. The baby herself is still a "happy baby" (the doctor has said that about her every single time), with her head well descended, her back curving up along my right side (hence the wadding on the right, I guess), her butt at the top of my uterus, and her legs and feet near the top left.

Poetry Wednesday

Yes, I know. But "Poetry Wednesday" has such a nice ring to it.

One of the most important things to know about poetry is that when you read any given poem, YOU get to be its interpreter. Of course, this fact is often muddled by the fact that poetry is part of literature, an academic discipline, in which there are scholars with "authority" and many classic or well-known poems that have established "readings." It's certainly valuable to have these readings. For one thing, if you read a poem and are completely lost, it can help to have others' interpretations to help you enter the poem. And if you are a scholar, you need to know the established readings. But if you really want to become your own reader of poems, you can't let these other opinions and interpretations distract you TOO much. You have to allow yourself the freedom to re-interpret based on your own experience.

There are two "classic" and well-known poems I've wanted to write about in terms of pregnancy. It's safe to say that these poems, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and John Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale," are NOT "about" pregnancy. But they are two poems I've thought of a lot since I've been pregnant, and my reading of both of them has been greatly influenced by my pregnancy. I figure I should write about them while I am still pregnant--as you can see, my little ticker is getting into some terrifyingly small numbers,

You can read "Do Not Go Gentle" here.

Now. You can tell by the links to other poems on the left side of that page that the poem is considered to be a "poem about aging" and a "poem about a father." I'm not going to argue with that: it's true. But the poem is also more generally a poem about fighting for life, or about resisting the urge to give in to overwhelming forces.

As you may have noticed from reading this blog, I have not found being pregnant to be the easiest thing in the world. It has come with some very overwhelming forces, such as exhaustion. I have often felt that it WOULD be the easiest thing in the world to descend into total pregnancy slothfulness. Just to sit down on the couch and not get up till it was time to go to the hospital. But it has also been important to me to NOT descend into inactivity, both for my own current happiness and my ability to maintain the strength and stamina to deliver a baby. I've bolstered my courage and resolve to make it through the last couple of blocks of the walk home, to get up and go to the pool, to wait for the Metro to come when there is no where to sit down, to walk up the escalator instead of standing, with the line, "Do not go gentle into that good night."

Related, and perhaps more seriously, I think there is a kind of depression that can accompany pregnancy. It's little mentioned or written about. In fact, I feel almost criminal for bringing it up. Most books discuss pregnancy as an overwhelming joy with a few minor and occasional drawbacks. I think the truth, at least for more, is more complicated.

Let me get out of the way these facts: I wanted to get pregnant, and I did, and it's a miracle. The fact that there was no baby, and then Dean and I made one, is astounding to me. Thinking about how the baby was just two cells, then a few more, then was the size of a lentil, is now apparently larger than a basketball, and is very soon going to exit my body and be a person in the world, is just as astounding. I am very aware that in most ways I have had an extremely blessed and successful pregnancy and I am very thankful that it has been so problem-free, and that the baby is so healthy.

But that doesn't mean the past nine months have always been easy. I have been overwhelmed. I have been scared to actually HAVE a baby. That's both the "having" as in the delivery and the "having" as in being a parent. I have been especially uncertain as to how having a baby is going to affect my writing life. I've been too tired and nauseous to write. The stuff I've written has not been stellar. And I have had to navigate the strange world of academia and pregnancy. My teachers were in general surprised at my pregnancy, and since they found out I was pregnant they have been distant. I have been asked if the pregnancy was "on purpose" and been told that "at least [I] waited till I had the degree." I went from being a student my teachers "expected great things from" to one they smile vaguely at in the hallway, saying as they pass, "You're getting big now!"

All this on top of the rest of life, the tiredness and the nausea, the tedious summer office job, the 2-hour commutes on the Red Line, the walking around in the heat, the uncertainty about the future, the loneliness of living so far away from most of my friends and family, sometimes added up to a feeling that felt a lot like depression. And I would think about the poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night--
rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It was helpful. I would think, this too shall pass. I would sit down and write SOMETHING, anything. I would call a friend. I would talk to Dean. I would think about the healthy baby wiggling around. All forms of raging against the dying of the light--the light being, in this case, a happy heart, a hopeful, thankful spirit.

Whew. Can we still tackle "Ode to a Nightingale?" Here is the poem. (It's long.)

This is a poem about which much has been said. (I am intimidated to write about the poem because one of my teachers is a Keats scholar. But here we go anyway.) Basically, the speaker (we'll call him Keats) is sitting in the woods listening to a nightingale sing. As he listens, he reflects on happiness and on life's brevity. I reread this poem last spring early in my pregnancy and was blown away by how much it spoke to my feelings at the time.

Let's go through stanza by stanza. I'll interrupt the poem to comment on what I see happening in it, and on how it relates or related to my feelings about pregnancy.

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

The speaker is tired. And sad. Sad's too simple a word, though--he's feeling complex emotion. It might help throughout the entire poem to know that Keats had tuberculosis and knew he was not going to live a long time.

"A drowsy numbness pains my sense" is a perfect description of my pregnancy exhaustion.

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

He's talking to the bird, telling it that his emotion does not stem from being jealous that the bird is happy, but instead from a kind of overwhelm-ed-ness that the bird sings at all. On top of that the bird "sings of summer--" a happy, carefree time.

In the cold spring when I reread this I guess the baby was my bird. I was thinking of the sheer improbability of the baby's existence. Of the full, ripeness of late, late summer when she would be born.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

"O, for a draught of vintage!" I believe I've written about this before. (Vintage refers to wine.) He's talking about the desire to "fade away," to escape the world of thought.

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.


The bird (and at this point, but not for much longer, the baby) have never known "the weariness, the fever, and the fret here...
where but to think is to be full of sorrow." This weariness and sorrow is what Keats wants to forget. At this point in my rereading I was chilled to the bone by the thought of bringing a baby into the world. where she is only going to face her own fever and fret.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

He says he will reach the bird through poetry. Ah, the solace of art.

"The dull brain perplexes and retards" is another right-on description of pregnancy exhaustion.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Stanza 4 ended with Keats saying it was dark. In this stanza he elaborates, saying he can't actually see what's around him, but that he can guess by scent and sound. Metaphorically, it's like pregnancy--you don't KNOW what's going to happen. You rely on body knowledge, on intuition.

"The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves"--beautiful.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

In a way Keats is saying it would be a blessing and very easy to "go gentle into the good night"--

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

and he notes that if he were to die, the bird's song would go on anyway.

I was thinking about children (my child) living on after the parents (me) are gone.

7.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

In a way, the nightingale never dies. The particular bird Keats is listening to, like Keats himself, will of course die, but Keats notes that other nightingales have sung and will sing the same song for ages. (This thinking seems very Buddhist.)

I was wishing (in vain of course), "thou wast not born for death, immortal baby!" And thinking the baby is me, the baby is my mother, the baby is Dean, is his mother, is our grandmothers...

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Keats is shaken from his poetry-thinking; the song fades away. But at the same time he wonders: is the music gone because he was woken up-- or because he "sleeps" (could be a real sleep or a metaphor--death)?

As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I was struck with the feeling that something had ended, that something else had begun. About my new life, and my old, I wondered "Was [Is] it a vision, or a waking dream?"

President Obama

spoke on campus today. Here is what he said. I didn't go, because I had to teach. (Some of my students did go.) I did see him in February 08 during the campaign. I waited two hours in the freezing cold. Even if I hadn't been teaching today, I don't think I have the stamina to stand in line that long just now. My students said there was already a long line at 5:30 AM. Apparently Obama started speaking around noon.

Even though we didn't go to the speech, on the Metro ride in this morning, the baby marked the occasion by shifting from the right side of my belly, where she has been hanging out for months, to the left.

Monday, Monday

I finally got a set of poems ready for submission to journals! Suki helped. I will walk the envelopes to the mailbox later. Cross your fingers for me--and the waiting begins. (It can take up to 4 or 5 months to hear back from these journals.)

In other news, The Wiggle Baby has a new name. Besides Amelia, which we can't seem to call her yet. Really, we just call her "the baby." But also, she is now The Baby Wad.

This appealing name is due to her new move, which is to wad herself up in a ball on the upper right side of my uterus. She has limited space as it is, so I am not sure why she likes to curl up in one spot like that. Honestly, it is not comfortable for mama. Dean pointed out that curling up in a small ball IS called "the fetal position."

Despite the way it feels, anyway, she must be a bit more stretched out than she feels to me, because at my doctors appointment last week I learned that her head was "way down there." The doctor said this as he was checking my cervix for dilation, a super fun and comfortable process, let me tell you. He said my cervix felt "at least half effaced" but never actually said if I was dilated. I got distracted with his explanation of why it was good the baby's head was down: "It can wear away your cervix now and make labor shorter." Right on! I'm for it.

Sometimes I can FEEL that her head is "way down there," another interesting feeling. I've been having crampish feelings that may be digestion-related (there's not a lot of space for anything but baby), or maybe Braxton Hicks contractions? I really don't know. They're not debilitating or regular, or associated with any blood or fluid loss, so I assume I'm fine.

We did a few more baby prep errands yesterday. Dean installed the diaper sprayer in the downstairs bathroom and we made the harrowing trip to the NoVA (that's Northern Virginia) Target to pick up some odds and ends. I am still at a loss regarding cloth baby wipes, and we have to figure out how exactly we are going to handle the diaper pail. Other than that, I really think we are almost all the way ready. As ready as we can be, anyway.

Dean and I have both been feeling a little restless. It's strange to think that the baby could come SOON or that we could still have 3 or 4 weeks to go. I'm kind of impatient but don't want her to come TOO early. My due date is officially 3 weeks from today. My mom has predicted an early baby. Dean said today that he thinks she will come "at the end of next week." And from the beginning I thought that September 25 would be a good day to have a baby. (It rhymes with my birthday, November 25.) If you'd like to cast your bets, now is the time.

I have been feeling alternately brave and anxious about the delivery. I took a "birth plan" to my appointment on Friday and discussed some things with the doctor, which was reassuring. He is agreeable to all of my preferences except he says I have to wear the baby monitoring thing around my waist once I am 5 cm dilated because the nurses are too busy to come in and monitor with a Doppler as they could if you were at a birthing center. I suppose I can live with that. He says you can still move around with it on. And at the time I figure I can always make a fuss if I decide to. Surely you can wear it intermittently? Besides the mobility issue, I've read that the monitors can make doctors and nurses think something is wrong when there isn't. Who knows. I've cut myself off from reading any books written by midwives and doulas. They make me anxious about a hospital birth. Honestly, I should probably be going to a birthing center. It fits my personality and gut feeling about this whole process better. But I didn't find out about birthing centers till too late in the game to get into one. By the time I called there was a waiting list for October births. I was seventh. At this point I am just trying to go with the flow. I know that if I WAS going to the birth center I would probably be anxious about not being at a hospital. IF I have a second baby--and that's a big IF--maybe I'll try the doula/midwife/home birth route.

As for the delivery itself, I had an idea that maybe giving birth is like teaching a class. In SOME ways--stay with me. It's just that I get nervous before every single class I teach. I vaguely dread walking into the room and getting started, and I worry about the little details. You just can't plan every single moment of a class and you have to think and act on your feet, and as a planner that fact makes me nervous. But then as soon as I start teaching, I have fun. I am always able to come up with stuff to say, and to think of examples and stories in the moment itself, and to handle what arises as it comes. So I was thinking maybe giving birth will be like that. You can't possibly plan or know exactly what is going to happen, but when the time comes, you will be able to go with it. That's my hope, anyway! We shall see.

Poetry Wednesday

I've been meaning for a while now to write about poems on the blog. This is for my own sake as well as the fact that lots of non-poets I know often ask me about how I read poetry or what kind I read. I thought it would be interesting to offer my own reading of poems that I like. And since I don't get to teach poetry this semester, it'll be a nice catalyst for me to keep reading and thinking.

Well folks, today is the day! I just happened to read this poem by James Schuyler, which is in this week's New Yorker. (I know: The New Yorker. But I keep getting it for the poems, the restaurant review and the cartoons, as well as the occasional amazing story, like the one about arson and the death penalty last week, which I can't link to because The New Yorker won't let you see their stuff online unless you subscribe. Bleh.)

ANYWAY. the poem (please ignore the copyright infrginement):

Love's Photograph (or Father and Son)

Detected little things: a peach-pit
basket watch-chain charm, an ivory
cross wound with ivory ivy, a natural
cross. The Tatoosh Mountains, opaque
crater lakes, a knickerbockered boy
who, drowned, smiles for a seeming ever
on ice skates on ice-skate-scratched
ice, an enlarged scratched snapshot.
Taken, taken. Mad charges corrupt to
madness their sane nurses. Virginia
creeper, Loose Tooth tanned black snake-
skins, shot crows for crow wings for
a black servant's hat, lapped hot milk,
flung mud in a Bible reader's crotch:
"You shouldn't read the Bible nekkid!"
Family opals, selfishness changes hands.
Tatoosh Mountains, opaque crater lakes,
find me the fish skeleton enclosed in
fish skeleton (fish ate fish) he had.


Whew! This is a hard poem to start with. If you're in with this post, you should reread the poem. Or read it aloud.

To me the poem is a collection objects, memories and people related to a speaker's childhood, a childhood "traveled" to through looking at by old photographs. However, I did NOT come to that conclusion until I read the poem several times and then wrote this whole post. I just moved it here to the beginning to make the post less confusing. I want to try to describe my process of reading and figuring out the poem.

First, what made me keep reading this poem after the first couple of lines was not the story (because I did not know what was going on at all) but the sound. I think the best place to begin is with the concept of rhyme.

A common discussion to have in a beginning poetry class is whether or not a poem should rhyme. You have the staunch defenders of rhyme, who vehemently recite Frost: ("Whose woods these are I think I KNOW/ His house is in the village THOUGH"), and you have your free-versers, who see rhyme as a trap and a prison.

In my opinion (and aesthetic), the truth is in the middle. While a contemporary poem that is a slave to its end-stopped rhyme (that's rhyme at the end of the line) is at risk of being viewed as (and actually being) boring and sing-song, a rhymeless poem has no music. One of the things I find to be the most fun, and challenging, about writing my own poems is finding ways to include rhyme-ish-ness without following a set form.

So let's look at rhyme-ish-ness (by which I mean both slant rhyme, which is when words ALMOST rhyme but don't quite, like "cat" , "car," and "can," and alliteration, which is when the same sounds are repeated, like the "k" in Kitten, Kettle, licK) in Schuyler's poem. First, "a peach-pit basket watch chain charm." You have your "ch" sounds woven through: peaCH, WatCH, CHain, CHarm. The "sk" of "basket" is close enough to "ch" to be a nice cousin. Then you have your "a" sounds and diphthongs (that's blended vowel sounds): pEAch, bAsket, wAtch, chAIn, chArm. None of the these make perfect rhymes, like "cat" and "hat," but the sounds echo each other with a pleasing similarity.

So the sound sucked me in, and there's tons more to say about the sound in the poem. But in the meantime, I'm reading the poem, thinking what in the world is he talking about? Lots of people's frustration with poetry, I think, comes from simply not knowing what in the world the poet is talking about. This poem, I think, ALMOST shuts out the reader but throws out enough lifelines so that a reader can build a little story and stay with the poem. The title helps: are we looking at photographs in a photo album? If so, then the opening lines tell us that we are zeroing in on "little things" in the pictures and then shows us some of those little things.

They are weird things. What's a peach-pit basket watch-chain charm? It is, I assume, what it says, a basket carved out of a peach pit attached to someone's watch chain. What a crazily small detail to see in a photograph! At this point, I'm drawn in to the poem by both its incredible particularity and its sound. And we keep looking: an ivory cross wound with ivory ivy. Well, that's a little easier. Most of us have probably seen something like that. Note the "o" sounds in use here, and the slant rhyme of "ivory" and ivy." (This slant rhyme is intensified by the fact that the poem repeats key words, here using "ivory" twice. This fascinated me too because it's breaking a KEY rule of good poetry, which is that you don't repeat words in a poem unless it's absolutely necessary. Here the repetition creates a sense of playfulness, and in this poem SO many words (cross, skates, lakes, scratched, mad, crow, fish..) are repeated that as a reader you know it is purposeful.)

So. This is a lot to have said about two and a half lines.

Moving on, I'm willing to stay with the poem, assuming I am looking at photographs. "A natural cross" catches me up a little. Is that a cross somehow found in nature? Like the intersection of branches or something? I can skip over it, assuming it is (or ignoring it). The fact that "the Tatoosh Mountains" comes next is reassuring too: not only is is also a "natural" image, it signals that we've moved from tiny and weird things to other things and places in the pictures. The lakes, the boy. (Note: I'd never heard of the Tatoosh Mountains but it turns out they are in Washington state.)

Now, a very interesting thing happens with the boy. It's an amazing transition from image to story and memory. The boy, in the photograph, "smiles for a seeming ever," because that's what people in pictures do. However, he is also "drowned." Whether this death is real or metaphorical, the boy is both present forever (in the picture) and gone forever (dead or grown up). "Taken, taken" emphasizes this beautifully. And it applies both to the "taking" of photographs and how the boy was "taken." From this point on the poem seems to move from looking at things in the photographs into memory or reflection, and to events that happened in the time and place the poem has created for us so far (which I am reading as a childhood vacation or home in the Tatoosh Mountains). Because I feel the poem now has a context and setting (which the title again helps to assure me of), I am willing to read the rest of the poem without exactly knowing what's going on or what's what, experiencing it as a collection of things and memories related to the speaker, his childhood, and his memories.

An interesting question is what is "Loose Tooth"? After I reread the poem several times it occurred to me that it could be a name or nickname. If it is, it makes the 4 or 5 lines after it make more sense. Someone named Loose Tooth tanned snakeskins, threw mud on someone reading the Bible naked. Could it be--going back to the title again--the father?

The poem ends in a glory of repetition, the mountains and the lakes again, as well as the image of the fish skeleton enclosed in bigger fish skeleton, another crazy object that the speaker is asking someone to "find" for him. But it's all done so compactly, and so swiftly. It's beautiful. There's a clear sense of loss, as is often felt, I think, when looking at old photographs.

One of the reasons I like this poem is that it IS so crazy. But, importantly, the poem gives me enough ground to stand on so that I can make my own sense out of it.

When I was thinking about wanting to write poems on the blog, one of my purposes was to show other people how I read poems, since when people find out I write poetry, they often want to know what I like to read and how I read it. I guess the lesson here is that reading poetry can be an adventure. I didn't mean to start with such a crazy poem, but to me this poem illustrates that you don't have to know what's going on all the time in the poem to enjoy it. If the sounds and images pull you in, you can read the poem the way you would look at a somewhat abstract painting, finding your own shapes and stories. Or the way you would look at clouds.

For anyone interesting in more about James Schuyler, here's a link to a brief bio. He died in 1991, but apparently a new book of previously unpublished poems is coming out soon, so I guess that's why he's in The New Yorker.

Well, it's happened:

the expiration date on the milk we bought this weekend is later than my due date.

As Dean says, the baby will now spoil before the milk.

Back to School

School began yesterday. Despite some nervousness and last minute syllabus copying, I had a really nice day!

I decided to drive to school so I could go to Babies-R-Us after class. The weather has been beautiful here lately, so I got to drive in with the windows down, listening to Morning Edition. It reminded me of the one thing I liked about my old Chapel Hill-to-Garner drives--it's kind of relaxing to drive to work with NPR. And I got to try out the parking situation. Instead of buying a regular parking permit, I got a "bundle pack," which consists of 10 1-day passes for $40. The faculty (yes, I am officially "faculty" now) can part in various overflow lots, some of which are literally miles from where I teach, but I found a lot within a 5-minute walk from my classroom! Good to know for when I return after the baby comes. I am saving the rest of the passes for then, since it takes so much more time to Metro than to drive to school, and I imagine I'll be on some sort of a breast pumping timeline.

I got to school a little early, so I went to the library and looked over my notes. I was nervous, even though I have taught the first day of English 101 8 other times, and I do almost exactly the same thing every time. It's just that so much of teaching is on the spot. You have to stand up and just go with it. I haven't been doing a lot of that this summer. But when I got to the first classroom and started the class, everything went very smoothly. It was fun!

My second classroom is directly across the hallway from the first, so in the 15-minute break I sat outside in the sun. The baby was very busy. It was nice because she was quite sluggish on Monday. I think she was excited to be teaching too. She did teach a whole semester last spring, but she was very young so she probably doesn't remember. I myself WAS remembering the first day of school last semester, which was the first day I actually believed the faint pink line on the pregnancy test.

The second class also went well. They were a particularly bright-eyed bunch, with most of them staying quite alert even through all the boring course policy information, which I have learned to go over aloud despite its dullness. The students just don't read it on their own.

The first part of the curriculum covers rhetoric, and this semester I am focusing on analyzing advertisements. As a unit project, the students will create their own advertisements in groups. After class, I went to the co-op for lunch, and as I ate I read the campus newspaper, The Diamondback. There was this front-page article that fits perfectly with the concepts I'm teaching, so after I ate I got 22 copies of the paper and took them to my office to use in class tomorrow.

Although I've been in Tawes, the English department's new home, all summer, yesterday was the first day I got to use it as a teacher. I used the fancy new copier/scanner to make copies for tomorrow, and then I went to my office. The offices are spacious and sunny, 4 desks to a room with a computer in each office! Compared to my old office, which had about 15 desks and a computer packed into a room not even twice as big as the new office, this is very luxurious. (And even more so for the TAs who had their desks in "the bullpen," a messy, noisy room in the old English building that was home to at least 30 desks, 1 computer, several filthy couches, and a refrigerator full of molded bagels.) The only thing that was slightly sad was that I was all alone in my office--there was something nice about always having a colleague to talk to, as was the case in the big shared space.

After I wrapped up all my teaching tasks, I made the thrilling trek to Babies-R-US through the College Park-to-Silver Spring suburban sprawl. As a pregnant person, I am not a great driver. Not only am I super paranoid that people are going to crash into me, I also feel oddly distracted, as though I can't focus. Plus I get terrible road rage. But I made it there, where I got to fulfill my dream of parking in one of the "Expectant Mother" parking spots right up front. (Dean wouldn't park there when we went together.) I took in Sophie's old car seat and got a new Graco Snug Ride, complete with silver buckle. It's blue and gray, which doesn't match Meg's stroller or mine, but the only choices were blue and gray or pink and brown. I figured blue and gray is more unisex for any future babies that might inherit the car seat.

Speaking of gender, all of the random strangers who have guessed the sex of the baby lately have thought it was a boy. They say things like, "When is the little man coming out?" They are always very surprised, somewhat skeptical, and slightly disapproving when I say she is a girl. I guess it's the way I'm carrying. I'm considering just going along with people and agreeing it's a boy, so I don't have to have such long conversations with people about it. I've realized that one of the things people who love being pregnant love about it is getting a lot of attention from strangers, but I don't really love that part. Sometimes it's nice, but other times... I'm just tired or in my own world. (And apparently extremely anti-social.) And then there are times when the encounter is just plain weird, as the other day when I was meeting Dean outside his office. A man, who was wearing black winter gloves for some reason, asked me if people wanted to touch my belly a lot.

"Sometimes," I replied, thinking fast about how I was going to reply when HE asked to touch it.

"Do you let them?" he asked.

"Sometimes," I replied again.

"Well, you shouldn't."

This was surprising. He proceeded to explain that every time someone touched my belly their spirit got into the baby and if they had a bad spirit, this harmed the baby. He told me how Mary, when pregnant with Jesus, kept it a secret for that reason. He said I should not even allow my family to touch my belly. I thanked him for his advice and sidled away as soon as I could, aided by some men wearing navy uniforms who stopped to talk to him.

Anyway, back to Babies-R-US--the car seat came in a HUGE box, which reminded me of Liz's recent experience with a car seat purchase. I loaded in the cart, car and house all by myself--don't worry, it wasn't really heavy, just big. After I picked out the car seat, I wandered around the store in the hope that I would spot any other item I might need so I would never have to go there again. In this way, I learned how very many baby products there are, and how "your baby's safety" is an important marketing technique in selling these. After resisting the urge to buy both a yellow "baby on board" bumper sticker and a digital kick counter that said it "reduced the likelihood of stillbirth," I paid for the car seat and left.

After that, we stopped for a healthy snack, a McDonald's hot fudge sundae, and I made my way home. When I got here, the Ergo carrier had arrived, so it was a big day for the baby in terms of new items. Tonight or tomorrow, we'll install the car seat, and then I'll get it inspected Friday. It'll be ready just under the "1 month before your due date" timeline!

To top off yesterday's pleasantness, I went to yoga, which is always nice. But it was extra nice because one of the women in the class, who I dislike because she invariably "feels really great" and does 10 REAL push-ups to every half-push up the teacher instructs us to do, had gotten all of her hair cut off! This proves that she has had at least ONE pregnancy symptom! (See The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy regarding the little known but common urge to cut ALL of your hair cut off during the third trimester. I have been resisting this myself.) Her hair looks fine, so it's not that I'm gloating that she looks bad. It was just satisfying that she showed SOME sign of being at all affected by her pregnancy.

All in all, a good day. And now I am off to a breast pump tutorial with Caroline and Lucy!