boarded the train and there's no getting off

M E T A P H O R S

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Sylvia Plath

*   *   *
It has been over a month since I posted and a bag of green apples it's been. At 11 weeks into the altered reality of pregnancy I think I may see the light: I only feel utterly miserable only three-fourths of the time.

I sincerely hate being pregnant. I thought perhaps that my first pregnancy was rather miserable due to the stress of two moves and four weddings. But the truth is: pregnancy just does not become me. I was speaking to a friend's mother recently, a mother of seven, and she told me she had so many children because she loved the hormones of pregnancy. She felt calm and peaceful while pregnant and nursing. After each child was weaned she dreaded the return to her normal self--so she just got pregnant again. And I concede that this is a problem worse that the one I am saddled with. Nonetheless, I think two children will do just fine for me: my mother-hormones tend to suggest things more like jumping off the roof of our 6-story building. I might as well ride out the remaining six months or so ahead of me lying in bed eating Häagen-Dazs lemon ice cream.

But ah! I am already a mother of a boy! There is no ride this out in bed. Ike unearths my hand from its hiding spot under the covers and pulls with all his toddler might, crying, "Go! go! go!"

Go, indeed. Go to the refrigerator and stand there, desperate to eat while despising everything I can see. Eating while pregnant for me means being so stuffed full of food that I couldn't take another bite while being overwhelmed by the urge to keep putting something--anything--in my mouth to ward off nausea, and at the same time detesting the smell, feel, color and very idea of food.

I am trapped in my body. I am trapped in a 5-block radius of my apartment in a suddenly distinctly ghetto neighborhood. The subway disgusts me. Our car is in a garage 9 blocks away. I cannot leave the building without ziplock baggies of candied ginger, saltines, apple slices, hard candies, a bottle of watered-down orange juice swinging on my arm--all to go 3 blocks to the grocery store where I will buy food that will then sit uneaten in the refrigerator because it is the most disgusting food I've ever seen.

Oddly, I am nauseated by colors too--particularly green and gray. I am nauseated by chartruese, forest, aqua, teal, lime, moss, putty, turquoise, ultramarine, beige, mushroom. Consequently, I am nauseated by the better part of my wardrobe. I am nauseated by Facebook. By my half-finished website. By my computer itself.

I'm sure soon, when the 2nd trimester finally takes hold, I will remember why I volunteered for this misery. But for now I am content that looking at my computer screen no longer completely turns my stomach.

{ poetry wednesday }

these hills are too green & sweet to have tasted salt

I am squeezing this post in before the lovely Poetry Wednesday ends. It's been a busy day, and only now, after Presanctified and take-out sushi, am I able to sit at my computer. It is quiet in our little living room: just the sounds of typing and clicking as Charles and I sit with our laptops, mugs of tea side by side on the coffee table.

Wednesdays go like this: I leave the house early for my DreamWeaver class at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) on 23rd and Lexington. After my four and a half hour class, I take the subway back uptown to 125th Street in Harlem and work-out at the gym. Then I walk 14 blocks home, usually stopping along the way at the bank and/or grocery store. At home I pay the nanny, make sure Ike is fed, and load the stroller with toys and snacks to get us through Presanctified. The church is a 10-minute walk, and Charles meets us there at 6:30. Half way through service I stroll around the neighborhood with Ike and place a take-out order at one of the Chinese or Japanese or Thai restaurants in the area. I return to church, put Ike in his PJs, take communion, and then head home, picking up our take-out order on our walk home. I have gotten so used to this schedule that I am sad that next week will be the last Presanctified service of Lent.

All this has nothing really to do with the poem I'm posting today, except it may explain why I am posting another Plath poem with little ceremony. My Wednesday schedule, added to the fact that I didn't write my post on Tuesday night, leaves me here, at 10:15 pm on a quiet Wednesday evening, with Blackberrying.

And it is a poem I love. In its fullness and its sadness: the lushness of the green hills and the cold metallic expanse of the sea. I suppose it's no stretch to say that the sea is a metaphor for death, just as the ripe berries are a metaphor for life.

B L A C K B E R R Y I N G

by Sylvia Plath 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,   

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.   

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,   

gapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me   

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock   

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space   

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths   

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.