Doreen GildroyIn the Bed
At the children's hospital entrance, carrying her over the bricks, incessant-- with the names of the dead ones burned into them-- my husband says Your whole world breaks open. Lying in the open bed with her-- so she would not fall. We move through time together. How many days has it been? And the other babies crying. * How one is struck. How another. I cannot easily conclude. In her cry everything moved before me-- color and shade, in the evening sky. I could only feel preciousness-- (though I could think many things). * Was I worthy? Lovely?: they are torments. I was never free to see myself limited and alive. No matter what we have to go through, he said. And in my solemnity I offer only what I am. * Sometimes I like that light the hour when Doctor Greene comes in-- and we will speak about her. I can't worry about my life: it is a glimpse, a refraction of light. * Not just her suffering draws me near: it is unblemished-- with a forceful face toward the direction of the sun: she likes that light coming through the slate-grey blinds which must be--to her-- geometric shape. * Child of morphine, child of pain. Placing the salve upon her face in disbelief that I am doing it. From my hands. I had imagined everything was separate and together. I imagined a beautiful creature and I held to that image. The catheter in, the bandages off. It was good to go to sleep. It was clean.
The Poet on the Poem
When my daughter was seven months old she had neurosurgery to untether her spinal cord. The doctor ordered a twin bed sent to her hospital room so I could lie next to her, nurse her, watch over her. I did this for days and nights without, essentially, ever leaving that bed. Undergoing that experience made me acutely aware of how the mind moves, how the eye--and what one is attending to. It transformed me and it also transformed my idea of work.
I placed the poem "In The Bed" at the opening of the manuscript Celestial Room (which is a book-length sequence of poems, really one long poem). It is a book about happiness, but also about terror, and what emerges to reveal the self, the beloved, and the "wholly other." Irving Singer, in his three-volume study The Nature of Love, states, "The love of persons enables us to respond to them; the love of ideals often helps in this, but sometimes hinders." I see the poem (the book) as a mapping, with a view to the alterations that take place in a soul which move it away from the received and into the experience of what the mind turns to spontaneously. The emotional landscape was, for me, always in the foreground. Dramatic details were a backdrop. I hope the poems render the experience of inquiry in its non-rational aspect, toward the object "of search and desire and yearning," to what Rudolf Otto, in The Idea of the Holy, calls the "feeling of the numinous." John Harvey writes in the preface:
Our "feeling" in these cases is not merely an emotion engendered or stimulated in the mind but also a recognition of something in the objective situation awaiting discovery and acknowledgment.... So far then, from stressing the place of the subjective state of mind in the religious experience, Otto's emphasis is always upon the objective reference, and upon subjective feelings only as the indispensable clues to this.And in this I find Singer instructive. There's a quality of shattering, and of restructuring. And a voice rises out of that compounding. As Singer writes: "For love is an attitude with no clear objective. Through it one human being affirms the significance of another, much as a painter highlights a figure by defining it in a sharpened outline. But the beloved is not a painted figure. She is not static: she is fluid, changing, indefinable--alive. The lover is attending to a person. And who can say what that is?"
Doreen Gildroy's first book, The Little Field of Self (University of Chicago Press, 2002), won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. Her second book, Human Love, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.
