Tahlequah, a mother orca, bore her newborn, dead calf 1000 miles
and 17 days through the inland waters of Puget Sound before she let it sink.
I’m lying in a hammock a month after birthing
loss, and thinking of Tahlequah. That moment when her calf’s eyelids
closed. The body’s heaviness. The decision? instinct? need
to bear it on her nose. Her pod swimming alongside.
Her extended Shivah.
No women in our family spoke aloud
of miscarriages or still births. Whispers in the kitchen
after a party or late night on the phone. Their shame creaking
like branches rubbing ceaselessly against each other:
did I drink too much, forget to pray, want it too badly?
No rituals or amulets for the named or unnamed.
Loss stacked in silence, fortified like a dam
lest words breach its murky eddies, its backwaters of guilt.
Lying in these woven, fraying strings, I cradle muteness,
hear the motor-less whirr of blades as my husband mows
a tapestry of stark, green swaths flecked with dandelion’s
shocked heads: a field-spray of prayer flags.
No psalms for the unborn.
No afterbirth to fertilize the birch tree.
If only the crow preening its slick self on the wire over my head
could lend me its bird’s eye view. If only as the crow flies
was the way through this mourning forest; instead
my flapping in trial and error.
Maybe there is only one practice: not like Sarah prostrated
in the desert beseeching God, that patriarch, to fill her womb
but the language of gift; the way I trade peanuts with the crow
for a gold bead, a red paper clip, and last week,
the half shell of a robin’s blue egg, missing
its hairless, curled remains.
–
Suzanne Edison’s recent chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Her poetry can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, Naugatuck River Review, Scoundrel Time, Mom Egg Review, Passager, SEISMA, JAMA, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Hedgebrook alum and teaches at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.