Three Poems by Carol Guerrero-Murphy
/AT THE ROOT CANAL, DON’T SAY “HEARSE”
Carol Guerrero-Murphy
I drive over a mountain to the city to get a root canal. The dentist is older and mobbed by adoring female assistants. He, attired in a cashmere black suit and brilliant white shirt, a cobalt tie, is an author who shows me the manuscript he is working on. The title page is scrawled, unreadable. I am enthusiastic about it, quite certain it tells well his remarkably interesting life’s story involving Berkeley in the 60’s. The assistants talk to each other about the drive over that same mountain, how they fear it, what stops they like to make in my little town. I try to add what I know, but they do not hear me. As a patient, it is as if I am not there. They insist on taking away the four little red pills I use for pain. They tell me the doctor knows how it will stretch the eyes of my ankles up over my calves.
I say I must find a restroom before he begins the procedure. Puzzled, they direct me down a long hall. I am led by a Tinkerbellish woman into a hangar-sized room. The morgue for those who died here. Large Tinkerbell flits around from corner to corner looking for the restroom, flipping back sheets from the dead’s faces. They are calm and not sorry.
It is warm in the morgue. Why not cold. I continue to have a sense of urgency; I need the restroom. In a tiny side room, an older woman is holding a baby and crying; it is her dead grandchild. She tells the faceless person beside her, “I have touched this beautiful dead baby more than I have ever touched my own son.” I try not to be afraid of the dead here; of course there are dead at a hospital. I know my father lay in such a place. But I must find my way out. When I do, there’s the next room, a gold-fixtured, maroon-porcelain bathroom made for the movie stars who must come here; relief. The dentist appears again. Let’s go for a ride in my car, he says. It is a big black elegant car (don’t say, hearse-like, though it certainly is a hearse) and although I think we are staying in the clinic, we drive fast. I am happy speeding forward in the car with nothing to see through the windshield. The engine is silent; he says he has spent his life trying to make everything quieter; he hates noise. I ask him if everyone he meets falls in love with him. Yes, he tells me. He is irresistible in his fine black suit and old face. I believe he is gay, and although I am a woman, I realize I have fallen in love with him. This is charisma. I want to ride in the big black quiet car wherever he drives. Perhaps I can skip the whole root canal procedure. Perhaps I will read his manuscript instead, and listen to good music as we drive, and we will remain together. He looks a lot like my dead father now. I’m not sure I should keep traveling, but he won’t stop the car.
OUT OF GAS
Carol Guerrero-Murphy
Tomorrow evening I expect to be in the desert
by the side of the road next to my ’53 Ford,
gas can in hand, wondering where to get it filled up.
If I have luck, no one will come to pick me up
and after a long time I will quit waiting.
At dusk I will notice through the sheen
of a desert varnish high how light outlines the fine edges
of dry grass, how black lizards come to lie on red sand
for the day’s last warmth, and rattlesnakes stretch across
the road like hopscotch lines.
When coyotes start barking and worrying,
and a string of cows and calves rushes
to their barns in obscure directions
I’ll crawl into the backseat
and hum myself to sleep in harmony
with the silent engine.
BIRTH EPIC
Carol Guerrero-Murphy
I.
The birthing a success by its most important measure:
the baby alive.
The father and friends toasting with champagne in recovery
over the limp but smiling, stitched up mother,
the pediatrician arrives by skis
a blizzard still spinning outside.
the baby alive if awfully overgrown
with long nails, peeling skin, and lungs full of meconium
kept in intensive care on oxygen wired to antibiotics
pricked half-hourly in the foot to measure blood oxygen levels
I could hear the baby scream and could not touch.
Do you know the literature of birth stories?
An oral literature, added to by new mothers everywhere,
each mother's tale repeated, epic ingredients perfected:
Through will-less heroism and the caprice of gods and goddesses
she gives to her people a gift from the other world.
what went well, what right. The terrible mistakes.
Always a measure of terror.
Call it post-partum anxiety post-partum depression call it
post-traumatic stress syndrome
like soldiers get. Mother has crossed the border between death and life.
No books, no manual, no survivors' groups for when the baby lives.
If everything goes well the idea is
the baby makes you forget. The urgency of its need,
its cries silence yours before they flower.
Sleeping sweet, chuckling, the baby in your arms
has power to comfort you.
The O of its waking. The rose of its yawn. The yoga of its breath.
The godhead of its living. Euphoria ecstasy
orgasmic nirvana of its tiny sucking, feeding.
Give a veteran of the trenches their healthy baby.
Look at the women sitting together telling their war stories.
It was a success by any measure, my baby alive.
What if it were calling from down the hall
and I couldn't hold it? Later, gowned green in the white room
I rocked alone and touched baby fingers. I have read the fingers
astonish most, little alien with thumbs, miniature
lined knuckles perfectly like ours.
The tale:
Through a blizzard we drove across town, across railroad tracks
to the birth center. Every bounce a quiet agony.
My (mostly) faithful husband at the helm. He had done with
refinishing the changing table.
Together we entered the antechamber of birth, the
politically correct cozy affirming quilted homelike midwives' island.
They heard what we had to say,
timed the contractions, measured dilation (peering in, ahem),
said, “You're not ready.”
I breathed Lamaze meditation. Appeared beatific.
We ferried back and forth for three days.
The gates to the otherworld remained sealed despite the flood
(concealed as a broken pickle jar in the supermarket).
My cervix opened enough for a pomegranate seed
but not a baby's head.
Why not?
Over-ready baby trapped above my cervix,
too big for my bones, my pubic bones dividing,
the slow deep ache of cartilage and bone splitting.
(I feel those bones again lately. An indulgence to say so. What could it matter now? My baby old enough to vote.)
The baby and I were eventually saved
(note passive construction)
when a green suited surgeon flew in, furious
at the midwives mistaking
my condition. Furious,
the baby inside drowning, dying.
The surgeon cursed and ordered people around,
shot me up, cut
that baby out. Saved our lives.
I kiss his hem, I kiss his ring.
I think he hated me.
Smelled something.
I felt I was a repulsive, bloody failure.
But whose epic is this anyway?
And who faces survivor duty: to make meaning of events, to decide
if they are accidental, purposeful, contextual.
Decide to forgive. Whom to forgive and whom to hold
accountable.
Whom to teach what to do next time.
Know what midwives failed to know.
Mother and author and hero.
We could use this were we misogynists.
All us women screwing up, inept, the women's center failing.
But I must use it. What a reach,
feminist politics stirred into our little drama
except that's always the way with private difficulties.
Especially birth. War. The battlefield is a white hall
click click click of shoes on hard floors
or rice fields where quiet women squat
unintentionally, caught off guard as if in a taxi,
or the heaped pyres where women were burned
for practicing midwifery.
What was destroyed must be rediscovered.
And when did midwifery begin? When we first walked erect.
From the time we were human, we needed help.
That squatting thing? Urgency, not choice.
The genesis story of pain begins when baby brains grew big
when women began carrying in their wombs
the potential to know what gods know.
I would have liked to know what is known about hormones now:
our urge to be with others is from
“rational anxiety, as human as our opposable thumbs.”1
I might have told the midwives, “Please drop by.
I've just mopped the floor.”
And when in our country did the first woman attend college?
Who is the first woman doctor? When? When did a woman become an obstetrician?
When were midwives kept from obstetrical knowledge? From the dark ages on, with the advent of the patriarchal religion Christianity.
When were midwifes allowed to know what obstetricians know?
When did the guild of midwives start again?
Study the testimony of Margaret Sanger, nurse mid-wife who became a pioneer for contraception, for choice.
After what we've been through, I'm for all the knowledge there is—pagan, underground, intuitive, folk, female, male, matriarchal, patriarchal, hierarchical, western, eastern, scientific, mechanistic, intuitive, warm, cold, homely, institutional—to be there for every
birthing woman, as needed.
II.
The second time, I picked my birth assistant
from the testimony of other women.
Oh, and the first guy, when I showed up,
said, “You know you're really old to do this”
and lost my business.
My choice, the reverend Dr. Hardee,
said I wasn't. But I was.
This baby conceived from an old egg
in an old womb developed placenta in the wrong place (previa)
so the odds were fifty fifty, he said eventually,
on the baby and my surviving.
The epic journey focused on keeping still,
traveling only to nearby medical facilities.
These were the tasks, the hero's tests:
Give a quart of fresh blood weekly
just in case I'd need it;
have my fluid levels checked daily
—there wasn't enough,
(the car metaphor is unavoidable)
and the baby couldn't float;
lie on my left side 20 hours a day
to feed better the baby's heart;
feel for the baby's fluttering movements,
count and record them;
monitor constantly its heart
for skipping, missing, rapid beats.
I grew fat with listening,
silent with listening,
jaw-clenched with listening,
strong.
I saw into the otherworld
through veil and water,
through dream and sonogram:
a photo of its every chromosome
and on the video screen
its snub-nosed profile,
its sucking mouth, its thumb,
its vulva a miniature orchid.
Still it came to the sort of crisis
one cannot be prepared for:
blood gushing as from a warrior's chest
when stabbed through by sword
he staggers, presses his hands against his heart,
and cannot stop the flow;
fear so fierce my knees
flopped violently, as when from pounding chariots
and horses weighted down with mail
the earth quakes at 9.5 on the Richter scale.
Then the baby's heart echoing from the otherworld
became silent on the monitor,
silent as a smoking battlefield
the living have left to spoil.
Around my naked body,
spread out on the gurney
and still as a corpse
(I barely nodded yes, yes, yes to everything, anything)
the medical team, those demigods,
rushed, shaving and injecting.
As I went under (no time for niceties,
the mother alert in the birth room)
I heard them say, don't let this woman
ever get pregnant again.
This woman? Was that I?
Post-traumatic stress?
Ask the day nurse about the time I buzzed her
and sobbing said my baby's eyes were sewn
forever shut with black silky threads
as soft as lashes.
The attendants in the preemie ward
laughed about it for a week.
Once home I wouldn't sleep, on vigil to her breath.
I woke her just to see her eyes
flip open like a doll's.
The Babylonian King Gilgamesh's friend
Enkidu died; he could not save him.
He lost the herb that gives immortality.
We could say that first hero's journey was a failure
except he learned to live and write his story.
The baby had the power to comfort
by the O of its waking. The rose of its yawn. The yoga of its breath.
The godhead of its living. Euphoria ecstasy
orgasmic nirvana of its tiny sucking, feeding.
What poor warrior has that.
Image Credit: Linda Relyea
Carol Guerrero-Murphy’s first book of poetry, Table Walking at Nighthawk earned a WILLA poetry finalist. She is a professor Emerita (PH.D. English/creative Writing, Denver University) and continues to teach in the College Prison Program of Adams State University. Many of her poems are set in the San Luis and Huerfano Valleys of southern Colorado where she lived for most of her adult life, or in Alaska, where she was a child. The poems here are included in Guerrero-Murphy's new collection, Chained Dog Dream, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
