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One Week After Miscarriage
by Anne Spollen
I.
You cannot live like stone. I say this
to the silence I fall through each day
that you cannot live like stone.
Yet I do. I am weighted
with the gravity of stone
I lack form,
and all my fire is done.
When I touch my arm
or my hand, I have no edges
I have grown shapeless
as wind. Nothing
stirs me. When I am caught
inside a puddle or a glass
the human face staring back
surprises me. A female face
where there should be quartz
or granite.
II.
You wake at night and
say the word: miscarriage
and what you hear is the sound
of loss. Outside there is
a wild spatter of stars
so you rise
and wonder if the baby
knew your voice, listened to the sound
of his brothers and sisters.
In the morning,
people call and you listen
to the phone ring, to the sharp sound
piercing the air
then you go back to stone.
III.
I long to be made of stone
rather than this flesh
so prone to dream and error.
You,
unborn son,
were both error and dream
begun in flesh, in all that warm
abundance of fluid and pulse
then plunged to a silence so sudden
that you must have known
you were falling into stone.
You were placed
in a garden of stones.
They are your family now.
IV.
Last evening, I walked to that place
full of wind and bramble,
with stones scattered like stars.
Tusks of darkness rolled in,
pulling the light out on their
pointed tips
and I stood there,
having only the night for warmth,
having only stones for love.
Anne Spollen is the mother of three children. Both her fiction and poetry have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. In 2007, Flux Publishing will release her first novel.
