Midwife

The Midwife Speaks to the Child She Could Not Bring I have held the threshold open with my hands — the warm and difficult passage, the long corridor between the not-yet and the strong first cry, the letting-go the body understands before the mind does. I have caught the living from the dark so many times the dark has lost its strangeness — it is just the mark before the word, the space before the giving of a name. But you were different. You stayed at the border, neither in nor through, the breath withheld, the cord's insistent blue — and I, who knew the crossing, could not do the crossing for you. Hands that opened wide the world, and could not open you inside. — I have not spoken of it. What is said makes permanent what mercy leaves as mist — the almost-name, the weight, the tiny fist that held my finger once and then was dead. The body keeps its own theology: the hands remember what the mind releases, the hollow of the palm that never ceases its phantom holding, its fidelity to what it briefly had. I go on catching the living from the dark, the cord, the cry, the ordinary miracle of breathing begun. But sometimes in the night I lie still, and feel the weight that is not there — the breathing that became the other air.