If Words Could Be

Looking through glass at this

February sky threaded with cold

grey-blues, slightly softer lavenders

imagining if words could be

muted like this, this sunset

that so subtly whispers toward closure

and if they, like persistent noise,

could find a certain hush

under this, these crystalline drifts

you see, I don’t know what to with these

words that fell as simply as this

this snow that shifts everything I knew

yet they seem a more solid something

something I can gather by hand and place

under this, these white layers

and let them be as something under snow,

a handful of auburn leaves there, suspended

matter under the seen surface

maybe they will become as winter’s leaves

something of spring, folded into the structure

of globed beauty, the sun, the early daffodil

that spherical reminder of warmth, of words

of the heart’s topiary that does, with time,

as this sunset, this snow, those leaves

I was a few months pregnant and washing dishes at a house that isn't mine, on a holiday that often reminds me of how little close-family I have, and thinking about how my father used to hide the glass pickle in the Christmas tree, when someone quite casually said to me that the expectations are quite high for the baby in my belly and that I could only hope to have a child as wonderful and beautiful as the one my boyfriend already has. Not wanting to be impolite, and quite frankly too struck by the comment in the first place, I softly nodded and smiled and carried on scrubbing, all the while wondering why someone thought that an appropriate thing to say to a pregnant woman who is not the mother of the referenced child. Now perhaps if I were the mother I would have viewed the comment more as a strange compliment, but since I am not, I saw in it my boyfriend's past with the woman he impregnated, I saw a mother who created a child perhaps more wonderful and beautiful than one I could raise and develop, I saw competition and comparison. And though I wanted to shrug them off and let them slip down the drain with all the particles from the pan, I found too much pith and stone beneath all the word layers. And so these I've held onto throughout this winter, throughout this pregnancy. But it seems, as a few months have passed, that I have allowed myself to bury them enough to give them space for transformation. What will come of them, I do not know. But as I look out at these winter landscapes and sunsets, muted or not, and as I feel my own body expanding and creating, I can only hope they are nothing more than matter for another wonderful and beautiful contribution to this world.