Dear Mother

A new collection of poems by Laura Tanenbaum

Readers of this blog know I have a book coming out later this spring — Against Money, officially out on May 7. Plenty of money-related content coming between now and then.

But today I’m writing about a different book: Dear Mother, a collection of poems by Laura Tanenbaum, just out from Main Street Rag.

Laura and I have been married for quite a few years now, and known each other for quite a few more. We first met almost exactly 25 years ago, at a grad student party in Northampton Massachusetts. So it’s a funny coincidence that our first books are coming out within a few months of each other.

Laura is doing a reading from her book next Tuesday, January 27, at the Lofty Pigeon, a recently-opened bookstore in our south Brooklyn neighborhood. (The resurgence of independent bookstores is one positive development in the contemporary US that I would not have expected a few years ago.)

If you’re in New York and into poetry, you should stop by. Admittedly I am far from unbiased. But I think the poems are very good.

Here are a couple of them:

IN-LAWS

“In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, ‘It’s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it’s air.’ ”

His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the high-powered couples do. No, he says, concerned. The fish has to come to him. I’m watching his concern, trying to see which plane of reality he’s accessing, except that I no longer know what I mean by this. I know only that the words “imagination” and “metaphor” are insufficient to the task. And so I take his side. After all, we’ve learned from David Attenborough that evolution has carried countless creatures from the sea to us, not one has reversed course. When you forget how to make gills, they stay forgotten.

All of this may be why, the next day, after the temperatures had plunged thirty degrees overnight and the NYC Parks department and I both failed to adjust—me without a jacket, them, blasting the sprinklers—I was the only one who didn’t rush to pull a child back from the flood. He stomped on every fountainhead, threw himself on the ground. When he came to me, shivering, and the only change of clothes I had was shorts, and I saw the mother who had frantically been calling her Juniper back from the brink shoot me the look reserved for the parents of bad-example children, it took everything I had not to shout, You don’t understand! He’s looking for his fishwife! Wants to learn to live in her world! Learning to be flexible! And aren’t they going to need that what with the world and everything… Because I’m sure that Juniper’s mother would understand. That, like me, she has trouble imagining the future these days. That she would be comforted as I am by the thought of my future self, a crone in a cave, welcoming in any creature still capable of both tenderness and survival, teaching my son to tend to her scales.

2001: A SLEEP ODYSSEY

When my mother died,
I was six months in.
His body the size of a melon slice;
her body vaporized.

The mothers warn:
Sleep now, sleep deep.
Soon you’ll be in bits,
every hour broken.

Three months to go:
A second child.
Horizon long
as the rocket’s destination.

But no sleep came.
It’s winter now.
Five years have passed.
The melon slice half grown.

When my mother died,
I was six months in.
Tonight we watch the skies.
This time rest rushes forth.

Deeper, rounder,
with padded edges,
a floating bottom.
I sleep through half of 2001.

Just as the mothers warned.
When I woke, it faced me:
that stupid floating baby,
whimpering like a lost doe.

The others wondered why the baby.
Was it back to the apes?
Back to their own losses?
Was it the need to obliterate?

I didn’t wonder.
When my mother died,
I was six months in.
The movie’s future firmly in the past.

I already knew.
Nothing worth living happens in order.
Whether you wake for the ending,
or jolt back, or whether you miss it all.