Postpartum Hemorrhage
Losing so much blood
is like the moment before an old woman
closes the shiny red window
shutters of her little apartment
in Chamonix, glancing up at the melting snow
where the bighorn sheep make their way
down steep rock faces, and she thinks for an instant
of the angels that gather
around a dead mouse
and then immediately returns to her chair
where she works on a crossword puzzle, the word
“coffers,” the clue,
“let me see what's in the household _______
and I'll get back to you
about making a donation”
(all in French, of course) while outside the apartment
birds carry sticks to their nests, and right around
here is where my sister and I went hiking in our twenties
and suddenly on the trail
between two mountain huts, I had
a panic attack, what, in another century
would have been called dread
as if my body was preparing me
for the mundane aches of what was to come:
the Legos I would step on
and, in a rage, hop on my one good
foot to turn off the bathwater
where my son played with his plastic trains.
Trains, in my family,
have always meant doom.
Mountains,
the promise of something.
The sea, the intermediary
between the old way of thinking
and the new. Sometimes, when I wake up,
a voice in my head
like some 1950s commercial
for naval oranges says
“Come to California!”
which reminds me of how in college
my friend and I would smoke
marijuana out of a hollow
green apple and walk
around Venice Beach
searching for the perfect
pair of sunglasses. And for hours
we’d watch the bodybuilders who seemed
composed of the twisting
musculature of the sun, our spirits pointed
towards the golden life—
weightless and ahead of us.
