Zephyr

Each morning trumpeted into being with a chorus of baby squawks.
Daffodils pushed through the barely revealed spring mud. Crusted snow
clung to the curbs. In his crib, my infant son sucked his fist
until he gagged. The polka dot mesh crib bumper that we painstakingly
selected surrounded him. In the afternoons, I pushed the stroller around
the block and around the block again, taking note of the finely painted
Victorian homes, each so full of wood, waiting to be undone
by one errant spark from a frayed electrical wire. I pushed the stroller
around the block again. I put the baby in a snowsuit that made
him look like a bear. The neighborhood nodded its approval.
We left winter behind. My infant son smiled in my arms.
Spring opened up to us, the days stretching like the baby himself
in his crib after his morning nap. I was not on the couch crying.
Who knew how the afternoon would unfold? I put the baby down
for a nap. I cradled the baby in a creaky wooden rocker.
I held the baby in my arms. He smiled. He bounced his open mouth
against my shoulder. We lay on the living room floor, he on his play mat,
me on the rug, listening to Joni Mitchell: O star light, star bright,
you’ve got the loving that I like all right / Turn this crazy bird around.
I walked the baby around the block in the stroller. The clouds nodded
their approval, let fly a short frenzy of final snowflakes that glistened
in the afternoon sun. The baby quaked his clenched fists. I put the baby
in a vibrating chair that rocked back and forth and played electronic lullabies.
Why is the bumblebee yellow and black? Why does the snow recede
from the back porch like waves of sadness? The tulips poked up
through the dead earth not unlike the tulips stitched into the decorative quilt
that hung above the hospital bed where I gave birth. There, two medical students
held my legs and joked about going to the gym. The epidural coursed
strong medicine into my spine. The anesthesiologist flitted in
and out of the room like a large hummingbird. Finally I held the baby
in my arms. He opened his eyes. His eyes were all the hungover mornings
I’d forgotten, every drunken sunrise I’d slept through. His eyes
were four dozen Canadian geese lifting off a late summer river, all at once.