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Outside After Dark Loonfeather Press, 2002 In this book , Hauser fulfills the mission of poetry to give readers a sense of familiar scenes and emotions. --Molly Miron, The Pioneer, October 6, 2002 |
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Full Moon: Reflections on turning fifty
Our birthdays tell us how old we have become. When we turn fifty, we have completed our fiftieth year. Fifty turns on the horse that is earth, galloping along its solar orbit.
VALENTINE
I was born December 24, 1942. By Valentine's day 1943 I was seven and one-half weeks old. Not able to crawl. Not able to speak. Not able to call by name my older sister and brother as they peered down at me in my bassinet.
As the count continued toward my first birthday, I did not pay attention to the war that rankled on every front. All I cared about was my mother's breasts. Years later, when I nursed my own babies, my father was pleased. "The dairy bar, your mother called it," he said.
My mother liked having babies. Before I was two, Karen was born, and before I was four, Nicky. With Gretchen and Brooks, that made five under the age of nine. But the year 1943 was mine. I was the newborn, the baby with seal eyes. Brown-eyed Susan, they called me, says my Uncle Joe.
And I was new life in a time of death. We had been in World War II for just over a year. I can imagine sitting in a room in a warm house, hearing news of a war not so far away in the geography of the heart. I can imagine, then, cradling a baby close, lifting her to my face so I could feel her breath on my cheek. I can imagine closing my eyes, and sorrow and joy precipitating into tears.
My mother has been gone, for me, longer than she was here. She died of cancer when I was eighteen. She did not get to contemplate her fiftieth year. She saw two of her children marry, but did not meet their children. She saw the Viet Nam war start, but not end. She did not watch on television human beings walking on the moon. She did not imagine the computer that is my pencil and paper.
I am sure she did not count the number of Valentine boxes she had in her life. It is the kind of thing you do when you turn fifty. Fifty birthdays. Fifty winters. Fifty springs and summers and falls. Fifty Valentine boxes. My mother loved Valentine's Day. We made a box, and she made a heart-shaped cake. And I have heart pans now and I make a heart-shaped cake.
I have eaten from fifty heart-shaped cakes. Fifty times I have seen the sun on February 14th, as it climbs the sky toward the spring equinox, which this year I will witness for the fiftieth time.
For fifty years I have reached for my mother on Valentine's Day. Long before I wrote it, this is the poem I wanted to say:
VALENTINE
It is February.
The month of hearts.
Blue-
blooded the sky
throbs with sunshine.
It snows still, yes.
White, white hearts
splash the air,
the eye,
the tongue.
White, white hearts.
Even this far off,
I can hear yours
beating.
The year when Halley's Comet came by, I stood outside at midnight, twenty-five degrees below zero, planted one eye against the eye piece of a telescope and traveled the sky. I did not see the comet. I did learn to call by name the constellation Pegasus and the star Fomalhaut, and to curse the moon for its brightness.
COMBUSTION
I took a sauna once, long ago, in a shed on the shore of a northern lake. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let the heat come over me. My heart rate picked up. My shoulders slumped. I might as well have been standing in rain, my body awash in water. I was the chicken sort and did not finally dive into the lake, but I did stand out in the night and let the air nibble me dry.
I felt good afterwards, lighter and emptied, relieved of the weight of all that sweat that had been lurking inside me. I sat for a long time content to just sit, and then had a good sleep, the kind that comes when you've left one day behind and the next is still in shadow.
That was about twenty-five years ago. I've had a lot of good sleeps since then, but forgot about the beauty of a gratuitous sweat. Forgot about it until a few years ago when my personal female sauna kicked in. Hot flashes. Hormone storms. The fireworks that signal the end of fecundity. A prolonged celebration of the rite of passage that is menopause.
Back on that night of the induced sweat, my younger son Aaron declined to join us. One ladle of water on those benign looking rocks sent him and his five year old body fleeing into the safety of the night. He couldn't quite leave us though. He pressed his face against the rough wall and peered at us through a large crack. We could see his one eye, opened wide like a mouth.
When I have a hot flash, part of me feels like Aaron. I watch, astounded, as an invisible hand tosses water on the stones of my body, and I ignite. How can flesh not melt? Then, of necessity, I give up the watch and close my eyes and float on the water, and then the fire expends itself, and I pick up my little fan and create a breeze something like the ones that frequent northern lakes at night, and then I just sit in the quiet puddle of my flesh, and if it is the middle of the night I sleep the good sleep of a person cleansed.
Of course, not all of the storms come in the privacy of my home. They come during meetings, during lunch downtown, at the grocery store, on the street corner while I am in conversation with a passerby friend. Awe strikes the company I keep, their eyes widening as a child's at the scene: my face turning red, water erupting on my brow, my glasses steamed, my arms windmills as I cast off as many layers of clothing as decorum allows while searching for a Kleenex to sop the water out of my eye wells.
Yes, I'm all right. Not having a heart attack, just a hot flash, news from the body front: this woman is shedding the garment of the lunar clock. Marvel at it with her, at her luck in carrying within herself an organic sauna. Any time, any place, she may slip away for a few minutes into a wash of free-flowing sweat.
Envy her. It is making her strong. Is tempering her with the fire and water contained whole within her human body.
The moon rises and sets, fulfilling its celestial circuit around the earth, and bringing us news of the sun.
FAT CHANCE
When I was twenty I was a slender woman. At five feet six and one-half inches tall, I weighed one-thirty, give or take five pounds. When I was about thirty, I took some of my clothes to a rummage sale. A friend and I were straightening the tables and she picked up a mini-dress, a slim hank of white cloth with spaghetti straps. "Who do you suppose wore this tiny thing?" she mused. I looked at it. It was tiny. Straight lined, no flares, no pleats, no elastic waist.
"I did," I said. She looked at me, and we both looked at the gown she had draped admiringly over her arm. I weighed one fifty or sixty by then and had given up dresses in favor of slacks, and waistlines in favor of flowing tops.
"You were thin," she said.
"Oh, I don't think so," I answered. "I've never been thin."
"Look at it," she said, holding it up. I looked at it, then she put the dress back on the table. We continued silently at our task, but I kept thinking about that wisp of a garment. I really was thin once, and I didn't know it. I weighed a scant one hundred and thirty pounds, and I thought I was fat. I worried about eating my eating. I felt guilty when I ate jelly donuts. I once ate half a dozen so I could throw away the package and no one would know I had eaten three.
As I sorted through other people's clothes, I tried to blame my self-deception on everyone, anyone else. Twiggy. Family who said "You're having another?" My parents' friends who said "You're just large boned" when I weighed one-thirty but was not yet five-six and a half feet tall. But I was the one who listened, and didn't listen. I remembered store clerks who said "You look wonderful," and my obstetrician who tried to tell me I was not fat.
I had an epiphany at that rummage sale: I had been thin once, and I missed it. I began to wonder what else I had missed, and then to wonder what I was currently missing. I could hear myself saying, in response to a compliment, "Oh, you're just saying that," or thinking to myself, "Oh, yea, fat chance."
Fat chance. I decided then to not miss another minute of my own life. Gradually I learned to say "thank you" when someone complimented me and, when I doubted them, to stop and consider that they might be right.
And this year I am offering myself a special challenge: to enjoy my body the way it is; to let go of the way it could be, or should be, and to revel in this ship that carries my soul so ably about the earth.
I weigh one hundred and seventy-eight pounds. I work out, and have discovered classy clothes catalogs for "large boned women," so some people don't believe it. "You don't look it," they say, the way they say "You don't look fifty years old." And they mean it. But I want to say to them and to myself, "Yes, I do look it. This is what one-seventy-eight looks like. And this is what fifty years old looks like."
Recently I have taken to standing nude in front of the mirror. "Look at that belly," I say to myself. "That is the belly of a woman who has borne two children and who loves good bread. Look at the curves of those hips, and the heft of those breasts. That is the flesh of a woman who has lived for half of a century."
The woman in the mirror straightens her shoulders, not missing a thing.