Angeline

Before you were born
I spent a few minutes,
not many,
imagining what you’d be like,
what strange things heredity
might pass on to you.

I wondered if you’d have
my nervous energy.
Would you be self destructive?
Glad for simple pleasures?
Thoughtful?
Or patient to a fault?

I didn’t give these musings more than a moment
or two.
We shared two brains back then.
I was in your utero fog:
I left these things to fate.

I thought perhaps the easier,
though much less significant
predictions I could make
would be imagining you physically.
Not even so much as a newborn,
but as a young woman,
in your twenties.
(Don’t ask me why,
I always imagined you this age.)

And I felt slightly guilty that the only thing
that I dared to dream about you
was something as shallow as looks.
But it’s true. I just couldn’t dive below that surface.
Or perhaps my preoccupation with your looks
had to do with my own
warped relationship with my own.
Nevertheless, let me be clear:
I never imagined this determining my love for you.
I never imagined disappointment
or that I could love you less because of it.
I just wanted to know you.

And I lacked imagination.
My brain was all pregnancy.
And that, for that matter, is what made pregnancy
all the more wonderful
since in those months I came to love
what I had once been ashamed of.

Round belly, soft hips, pudgy face, slower mind.
You were softening all my edges.
The whole pregnancy was all physicality
and in stages.
First nausea and tender breasts.
Then swells of blood and heartbeats.
Then flesh and bone and features.

Pigments arrive.

Imagining you with our dark hair,
our thinnish lips,
our noses.
But the eyes?
Would they perhaps be like my own?
Yes, I conceded.
They might be.
(I had been complimented on them
so I foolishly imagined you
with what I thought to be my only best inheritance.)
I imagined you,
an individual,
your own you, of course,
but with my eyes.
Two tiny reminders
that you were mine.
That you came from me.

And then you were born
in the heat and light.
Then you were born
and the sun rose in the evening
and the world turned upside down
to see you at the right angle,
to get a better look,
and then she paused.
And then she sighed.

You looked up with your new baby eyes
seeming to see all,
seeming to know us,
and your eyes,
as sure as you yourself seemed,
were not the indecisiveness of slate.
No, much unlike my own,
they appeared very old and dark.
And though in need of rest from your passage,
your eyes were calm,
purposeful and perceptive,
seeming to know everything about the world,
about the Before
and the After.
Knowing everything of Truth and Beauty,
of sadness that cannot be helped,
of fear that should be no more than fleeting.
Just waiting patiently
to pass the message on to all of us
while you yourself still remembered it,
as Wordsworth said,
our birth but a sleep and a forgetting.

One of the angels, certainly,
you’d already traveled hard to communicate,
but in due time.

And yet from that first night I held you to my breast
I realized that if anyone remembered
the old, almost lost language you spoke,
they would have understood immediately.
Sometimes I thought the divine was upon me,
and I swear I could hear you speak.
Your requests were simple,
voiced clearly and audibly:
Love.

You, my dark-eyed daughter,
now the present.
You, the new hope of promise and possibility,
reminding also of all that is good and familiar.
There this one's dimpled chin,
there that one's apple cheeks;
the miracle of you surely being
this blending of all known and unknown old,
into the all new and beautiful you.

Herald seraph,
harbinger of warmth to that which is still dark,
to that which is so much older than we are,
your eyes pastoral
are full moon and mystical.
Smoky granite,
they are honey and amber,
autumn and hearth and red firelight.
All darkness and depth,
all earth, all light, all sun.

To see them is to gladly pass
on those predictions
and misunderstandings of my youth.

To see them is to know
the only true
voice of God.