Our Andromeda (7 page)

though it can see the trees.

The succulent has no bud for salt

but one mile away the deer lick

and lick as if the sea

were in its newborn body,

replenishing the kelp of the hoof.

Though a sea would as soon

drown a deer as regenerate it,

there's a patch of mercy, sweetly

skewing between the two.

The new wind is already in us, older sister

to us all, blowing windfall and garbage

alike to those who do not deserve

either gifts or refuse.

And then of course, there were the friends.

It's amazing how the ones without children

leapt to their feet in anguish

and keened, utterly genuine and broken,

made their way to our apartment with stews

and wine and tears, fruit and olive oil

and kindness so beautiful it wasn't of this world.

While our own families, our parents,

seemed so stunned (as if by a stun gun)

by their own fear that they receded

into an ether, the veiled planet Venus

for all I understood, some bright

occasional visitation and months

of silence. And, oh, the friends with precious

children. The ones who withheld,

thin-lipped. The most articulate,

sensitive souls suddenly bumbled,

tongue-tied, unable to say anything at all

but the weakest thing, the things that

actually made everything worse.

We're so scared for you. We're so sad for you.

As if our new child had died. I remembered

so vividly the ecstatic leaps of joy

I'd made without condition,

when their children were born. I knew

from several occasions that the most basic

thing to say was:
Congratulations!

Because our beautiful baby boy

was in fact alive. I heard mostly silence

from the parents of those kids I'd celebrated.

Why on earth would it be the closest,

dearest friends to shit the most toxically

on a sad new family struggling to find

blessing where blessings were?

I wondered. It seemed to me that those

with children could ill afford

to sympathize—we were their nightmares—

how could they not be half-glad

it happened to us and not to them,

our misfortune statistically

tweaking the odds of misfortune

in their favor.

But the guilt of that relief

showed on their faces. A sight

I'll never forget.

Of course, our crisis doesn't actually

mean anything for the likelihood

of others'. It's all a trick

on the parent-heart, and we all fall for it,

how else to sleep? When I was advising

a dear student about her chances

of becoming a Rhodes scholar,

there were many grueling numbers

and pairs of numbers meant to terrify:

forty thousand applicants for twenty-four scholarships,

for example. But once she was a finalist,

I told her: your odds are now 50:50.

Not 852:1. Either you get it or you don't.

Yes, parents. I wish that my son's pain

meant your child would be spared,

but my son is not Christ. And I am no

damn Pietà Mary. In spite of our proximity,

your kid is just as likely to be next. 50:50.

By the way, the student didn't end up

a Rhodes scholar, and I told her

that, for a poet, the experience

of not winning the prize was going to be

more useful than anything else

thus far. Oh, but paltry
usefulness!

The uses of disappointment are shit

when you just want the big damn prize

or want your child to be able to move

his limbs and talk. Back to the friends,

though, since this is the only place

I can go back to them, it seemed

to me that those most frightened

not only for their children but about

their places in the world, they were the most

grindingly inept, the least able to drum up

compassion. Those gunning for tenure

with little achievement to support it,

stay-at-home moms who had once

been talented but were now pretending

they were not in order to “raise a family”

and to slide into inanity. I don't know what to

make of such spiritual inertia but it seems

like the same stuff racism's made of:

fear of difference:
As long as it's not me,

I don't have to know anything about it.

As long as they stay the hell away from me,

it never has to be me.
As long as they stay

weak enough they can believe they will never

be gutted by this particular pain.
Not my

child, hurt like that
. As long as they seem

incapable of handling such trauma,

God will never force them to.

Secret, smug believers!
God never gives you

more than you can bear,
they like to say, as if

the strong should be punished for their strength:

We can bear it. So we got it.

But what about my baby? How weak does

a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?

And why press down so hard on Cal when

it was I who grossly claimed superhuman strength:

I know I can deliver him, I know I can

push. I don't care how much pain I'm in,

I can handle it! I can do it! I'm the strongest

fucking woman in the world!

When in fact, if I had let myself be weak,

a C-section would have kept Cal safe

and I'd never have seen the true spirit

of some of my once-close friends.

It's like that old college saying:

Alcohol kills brain cells, but only the weak ones.

I'm certain that I'm merely, unadmirably,

jealous of these friends who certainly

have their own problems,

just not the problem of an injured child,

and I have an uncomfortable,

oozing rage, as if I'd pissed myself

and had to sit in it. Rage that those

who are so fearful of my pain are the ones

who will be most spared it in their own lives.

Let them be poor, then, let them continue

their sexless marriages! Give them

a number of “scares” after which

everything will be fine. A surgery or two.

Misery. Even give them the illnesses

and deaths of their own worthless

parents. These are the mute friends

whose children will be spared.

May they suffer every other misfortune!

I probably shouldn't be telling you

such ugly, monstrous things, Cal,

and I'm not. I'm telling the Andromedans,

to plea for a place in their galaxy.

I want to tell them
I am among weak

people here, and I am strong,

and I don't want to be strong anymore.

Let me be weak in your world,

among kind people who are not afraid
.

We'll just have to convince them

that we belong there, Cal, though I'm worried.

I've become bitter and angry,

not at all the kind of citizen I imagine

they'd honor with a new beginning.

But then, “beginning” begins with “beg.”

Okay, the truth?

I've been wrong or I've been lying

or I've been ignorant. It doesn't matter

which. But now it's time to give it up.

You came from Andromeda, Cal,

that other galaxy. Came to me, to us,

the moment you were born,

when the membrane between

worlds snapped and all that alien love

flooded my body. It came from you.

There was awful confusion because

you didn't seem to be of this world

and the ordinary humans

didn't know what to do. Not even me.

Mommy and her stories, those fairy

tales we have here,

wretched and unending, children

lost in the woods. No wonder you've

always looked at me so quizzically,

a story like that is too tiny to contain

Andromedan you, lost in the Milky Way,

magical boy weak from his first

intergalactic journey to my arms.

I found you, didn't I? I am here.

We found each other, we are here.

And here is where we belong, for here

is where you are you. Exactly you.

Not some other boy in some other world.

I was wrong to mourn so,
he deserves

better
and so forth. You are better.

Better than any lesser truth I could invent.

I opened my eyes from that long dream

to find you here, my perfect child.

You taught me the truth, Cal.

Accept the truth from whoever gives it,

the ancients said to your people.

The truth is you are the truth,

a child born to a liar who is learning

to change. A dashing boy who may never

walk who traveled so far

to be here. A joyful boy who may never

talk who ruthlessly teaches

the teacher the truth

about where children really live.

Where you are alive. You are the most

perfect Calvin Makoto Teicher

of the Universe, a tough, funny

beauty of a boy who holds my hand

and blinks his eyes until I'm

excruciated, mad with love.

How hard it was for you to convince

me that I deserved that love.

My glorious son! A mother's boast

is never merely delusion. A mother

knows, if she can forgive herself

for not knowing. I know now, Cal.

Your frail arms are perfect arms.

Your uncertain eyes, perfect eyes.

Your anguish, your illness, your pain.

Your difficulty, your discovery. Your joy

is my joy and it is a perfect, boundless joy.

God must exist, a God for me after all,

and he must be good, everlastingly so,

to have given you to me.

I don't need any more proof than this.

You in my arms, your little searching fingers

on my face. Wistful, graceful

stars on a wet, clear night.

Galaxies exploding everywhere

around us, exploding in us,

Cal, faster than the lightest light,

so much faster than love,

and our Andromeda, that dream,

I can feel it living in us like
we

are
its
home. Like it remembers us

from its own childhood.

Oh, maybe, Cal, we
are
home,

if God will let us live here,

with Andromeda inside us,

doesn't it seem we belong?

Now and then, will you help me belong

here, in this place where you became

my child, and I your mother

out of some instant of mystery

of crash and matter

scattered through the cosmos,

God-scooped and poured toward

our bodies. With so much love,

somehow. I am so tired

I cannot beat my own heart anymore.

Cal, shall we stay? Oh let's stay.

We've only just arrived here,

rightly, whirling and weeping,

freely, breathing, brightly born.

About the Author

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of
Human Dark with Sugar
(Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
Interior with Sudden Joy
(FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy's poems have appeared in
Best American Poetry, Harper's, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
and
The Rumpus.
She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the editors of the following magazines:
The Awl, Harper's, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, Slate,
and
WSQ
(
Women's Studies Quarterly
).

Enormous thanks to the MacDowell Colony, for exquisite hospitality, beauty, magic. And gratitude to the Corporation of Yaddo, for generosity, time, space. This book wouldn't exist without residencies in both places, and was in large part written in MacDowell's New Jersey and Barnard studios and in Yaddo's West House. Much work was accomplished thanks to the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown University. Thank you, American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets.

And with personal gratitude:

To Deborah Landau, Paul Muldoon, Hilton Als, Meghan O'rourke and the Pretendettes, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, J.D. McClatchy, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Elliott Dark, Rebecca Horne.

To Ann Hood, whose work and compassionate conversation gave me the courage to write the title poem. (Though she didn't realize it and therefore shouldn't be held responsible for its failures.)

This book is especially indebted to the beloved Members of Team Cal: Sami Akbari, Imelda Laborce, the Roosevelt School, Dr. Joseph Levy, Dr. Elizabeth Fiorino, Huck Ho, Tami Gaines, Robyn Uslip, Lindsay Orcutt, Lauren Joyce, and my family. And to the special moms who have really been there: Molly Peryer, Leonie Lewis, Eliza Factor, Aine Carroll, and Jamie Mirabella.

To Dr. Andrew S. Gardner, for Simone.

To Craig. I just love being with you. Even here, on the acknowledgments page, I am glad to be talking to you. You make me happy, and you make our kids happy. That's all the kinds of happiness I need in this life, my love.