Baby

Five hundred years ago,

in the rose colored sheets of your marriage bed,

you gave birth to a scaly little baby with full eyebrows and lashes

and an incongruous laugh

that you’d insist, every year, slicing the pink ice-cream cake, sounded like

bells in the snow.

That was a long time ago, but you still recall with infinite fondness

Your daughter’s nubby stumps of wings that

Protruded from her shoulder blades like

Underdeveloped angel wings

(they never grew, really, and the prickly gray feathers that appeared every winter

would fall out, come spring. There was no mistaking her for

an angel.

There was no mistaking her for a relative of the dinosaur, per se.)

But as I was indicating, she was forever condemned

Earthbound, to crawl around the squares and circles and tits and phalluses

That walk the earth; to circumnavigate their clumsy feet

(she stopped growing after she was three years old, didn’t she?

She was the size of a breadbox.)

And she would hang from the silver bathroom fixtures and ceiling fans,

And her black, crescent nails would click musically along the counter tops

And hallways.

She was not unlike a human, and that she could not talk was not an indication of intelligence,

Per se, but rather that she lacked the proper vocal chords

and lung capacity.

But I’d like to talk about you, how you were the real phenomenon,

How you, with the endless tenderness of a Mother would

Rub into her knobbly spine and scaled skin

Eucalyptus oil, and buttermilk, and Johnson’s cherry-scented baby lotion

to make the scales disappear

(and though they never disappeared, they became soft,

so that the cousins brave enough to hold her would remark on the silky texture and exclaim,

“Soft as a bare baby’s ass,” and then blush.)

Daddy left home pretty early, didn’t he?

You missed him for a while, but there were greater pleasures to be had

(your daughter’s girlish giggle broke the air like

one thousand green eyes opening.)

Maybe he saw too much of himself in your little girl,

Too much of hell in each leaf colored scale,

(if he did, he misunderstood.)

Or perhaps it broke his heart to bring a damned thing into the world

(it’s an unfair world, he’d have said)

You were intent on joy.

You alone would delight in her innocuous spit bubbles

That would break and refract sunlight into its

Infinite rainbows across the kitchen tile.

She would coo, and make bird droppings into the quaint cotton diapers your mother

Had sent before her birth. She was easy to clean up after, and

The fact that she ate the heads of your dining-room table

Crysanthemum and marigolds with her tame pirhanna baby-teeth, invited you to say that

She had a delicate disposition.

And every woman friend of yours was aghast, and began to talk.

And when they started refusing the tap water from your sink,

Or started rinsing their diaphragms in lemon scented disinfectant,

Or eating full, snowy cloves of garlic raw and crying big, fat, desperate tears and

Praying to Jesus, his father, Mary, Moses, Abraham and the Holy Ghost and Santa Claus

That they would have human babies,

soft and pink and healthy, ten fingered and toed, with

delicate genitals and belly buttons and red, red blood,

you forgave them because the love you had for your daughter was

free of spite. She had come from your womb

and you had cut her umbilical chord yourself with delicate silver scissors,

as the doctor vomited into the plastic waste basket beside your bed.

She refused breast milk, but you ungrudgingly filled her bottles with

Chicken’s blood and heavy cream, as desired,

And you knew she was a good kid. She was yours and beautiful.

This was a long time ago, and since your daughter was born into this world

Things have changed.

People don’t discriminate against lizard children, anymore,

There are hotlines, and support groups for that.

Your baby accidentally bled your terrier Muffin to death once, and

That caused a crisis in your neighborhood until a family friend

With a diploma in medicine prescribed sugar tablets that he swore

Would terminate her violent tendencies.

But this is a poem about you, and how, through your infinite love and loyalty,

Your selflessness and maternity, you bore a perfect misfit

To this world, and how when your own mother, dying of stomach cancer at the time,

Looked into the baby carriage and, without commenting on your daughter

Labeled you a Martyr,

You quietly put the baby on your shoulder and left the house and did not talk to her

Again until she was almost dead and forgiveness was due…

And how you’d pace the nursery with the bicycle wallpaper

And hum cowboy songs into the spots on her baby head where ears belonged,

And lay her down in her special bed of chicken fluff and flower petals,

Where she’d curl up into a sea shell spiral, into herself,

And sleep

And probably dream.

(2007)