Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse: Poems

The New Mothers

The New Mothers I got a job working in the orphan hospital. Mothers were all I thought about then. What mothers did, what you did if you didn’t have one. Babies there never cried, not even the sickest of them, and that was not good, I thought. They did not cry because they got, somehow they got, that if they did, no one would comfort them. And I thought—I don’t know why—someone should teach them about comfort. So the other nurses and I wrapped some clocks in blanket scraps. Each crib got a bundled clock. To mimic a heart. Like you do for dogs. That was the order of how we began to make mothers. We made them meter—the white noise of the clock beating in their sleep, or for one baby who had a brain disease and maybe couldn’t hear, we thought, we gave him a loud clock, so he could feel through his mattress the beats. We set a pattern—a clock in the crib at nine o’clock was their nightheart.—They liked it. If we took it away, they would kind of fuss, and we’d put it right back, nestled in a blanket near their heads. I was happy we taught them a comfort. And the papers covered it—a new invention from orphans’ nurses—a babybalm device, a mother apparatus—but really it was just meter, after all, just a pattern of beats—but the papers liked that too—that meter was portable—they thought it was cute that we were teaching the babies to say meter instead of mother. The words were so close in sound, and we were such suckers. We couldn’t hold all the babies, and they were sick, but we taught them about beats and that was a comfort. But then the clocks began to break—they were just cheap windups—and when it got too quiet, the babies would fuss. We’d bought out all the clocks and watches at the drugstore down the street, and we couldn’t hold all babies at once. Anyway, they wanted noise, not arms. So we began tapdancing and rhythmically whistling. We came on shift armed with metrical poems. We prayed for a tin roof and a heavy rain. And we were such suckers, we began to believe in the mothering of meter . . . me wearing my watch tight, much too tight, so that I could feel the beating against my wrist—it was a comfort—and as time passed and my wrist began to swell, another nurse asked, why so tight, like a tourniquet?—and I said, palpitating, meter stops the bleeding. At that time, I did have a real mother— most of us did. We’d been held. And now our own mothers were old and it was time for us to hold them, except they were far away, in other kinds of 9 hospitals, and so we, pursuing the bodily pleasure of beating, pooled our money. We bought for the ward a grandfather clock, the kind with a large pendulum—we’d hold it on our breaks and listen. The papers reported it as a sad turn of events. We weren’t supposed to believe in our own inventions . For mother now, we said meter. For medicine, we said meter. We taught the babies the Greek root—med, we said carefully, to count and to care for. See, we said in our baby voices, meter has always been a mother. No one else will love you, we said, in spite of time. We gave them the word and its sound and its feel so carefully, meting it out as a loving sentence. All that time the babies caged in their cribs. All those nights we’d beat on them, say meter. Shush. Meter, shh, say meter. It’s only your mother. 10 ...