Intersection #15
With Intersection, her monthly column, celebrated poet Chelsea Dingman enters a place of questions left hanging—of lyric understanding, of addiction, and womanhood, and politics, and death. This is the final essay of the series.
As They Fell Inside the Soft Throat / of our Farewell
It snows. Valentine’s Day. I am trying to write toward what I want in my life & away
from what I can’t hold. Where to put it down. Where?
*
Our city reopened last week after being locked down since the beginning of November.
A semblance of normalcy falls over us now like snow.
It has been below zero for weeks.
I can’t help looking forward by looking back. Still, a door I can’t open breaks my heart.
The sun, so bright the snow is on fire.
Where to begin again after any ending?
*
This past year has felt like a death. Something to mourn along with those who have been lost. To the people I love, I have never been closer. To others, I’ve become strange. A stranger. Estrangements: the lake under ice. Family as I once knew it to be. As I now redefine it for myself. Faith in the world at large, held anywhere else.
Spring: joy / joy /joy.
*
My second book is having its first birthday. My daughter is fifteen months old. My husband delights in watching me play with her. My sons are almost taller than I am at 12 and 14, but it is the way they are so present that makes me feel alive. How they care for their sister. How she came to us as though thread, & wove us out of want.
Fifteen months later, my hair has an inch of new growth that is curly. The rest is straight from over a year of pregnancy hormones surging through me. Each time I’ve been pregnant, my hair has grown in straight from the root. My curls, a byproduct of teenage hormones. My curl pattern changing over time to prove I am powerless over my own body.
Endings as though small deaths. A poet-thing, I guess.
Today, I am trying to pause & mourn not having another child. Not because I want another child, but because I am so changed by this landscape. Because not having another child means I will die someday & I have been hiding from my own death.
And “the clock ticking inside me” is not fertility. It never was. It’s the hour that already exists somewhere to erase me.
*
How do we live with our own mortality?
*
I think I’ve been living two lives: who I would’ve been had my father lived & who I am instead. Perpetually striving to be whole when there is no remedy for fragmentation. Of the need to rewrite my childhood in others, I am guilty. I didn’t know it before, but I do now.
Not only can one not revisit childhood, one cannot stop revisiting it. Revising it.
I’m learning not to be defined by what arrives, what leaves. Snowsquall. Tulips. Fear—
*
Last year at this time I was in Arizona. I reconnected with old friends. Saw my son do something he loves. Spent time alone with my husband. I went back to work two weeks after my daughter was born. I wonder now if it was worth the time I gave up with her. With myself.
The disconnection I feel: body & country & field. Where I come from. Where I’ve been. What a life amounts to. What I am working toward. Not why. But what next—.
*
The trope that balance is difficult for women has been worsened by the pandemic. Women with small children are expected to earn & raise & write & do. I have been told this enough to know. I tell myself I have been enough.
*
February light sashays through the blinds. Above, the dandelion sun in a puzzle of cloud.
Here, I write this to escape disappointment. Not in myself, but in others.
I write this thinking about how much it will matter at the end of my life what I’ve written & how it was misinterpreted & how much of myself I gave up worrying about who I was hurting & how I belonged to poetry because I could divorce honesty from journalistic truth & how to reconcile my lives.
I write this because all I have of my father is a ski sweater: burgundy with beige stripes across the chest. He was smaller than I am. It hasn’t fit me since middle school.
I write this because I am afraid not to.
I write this to give thanks. Or love. For words & people & this planet & this life.
I write this to feel immortal for a minute. To touch anything that will live forever.
Because light. Because sky. Here & here & here & here.