Intervention, a poem
In which I visit my parents before I was conceived.
This is Poiesis, where I occasionally share poems and how to make them.
There are two photographs of my parents before they were my parents, when they were lovers, in love, just kids. I found the photos years ago in an album in the master bedroom. All the other photos were in albums in the living room, placed one on top of the other under the glass coffee table like an exhibit in a museum. But these photographs were part of the ‘special private collections’. On the day I first saw them, my stomach whirled with the joy of discovery. As a collector of our family’s stories, I’d never seen anything like them.
There they were, my parents, not like my parents at all. In a bedroom, on a bed, they were lying on their stomachs like kids at a pyjama party with their feet hitched over the bedhead. In the first photograph, they’re posing for the photographer; in the second, they’ve forgotten all about him or her.
What interests me about these photographs is that my parents are younger than what I am now. They are also people I never met. I would have liked to have known them. I would have liked to have met them before I came along and changed everything, and changed them.
I remember hearing about an old wives’ tale where babies visit their future parents and entice them to fall in love so that they can be born. Have you heard this tale? Or is it in some old myth?
Here is a poem I wrote in response to my discovering these photographs and my parents as personas before my existence.
Intervention In the photograph, they lie on stomachs, feet hitched over the bed-head, faces held for the two-tone camera. They are younger than what I am now and there's no sign of what will change them; no lines around their eyes and mouths, where their big moments will imprint. No sign of how I'll make them age, how I'll slip between their coupling, in their double bed; the extra presence, reminder that the wings will be stored; folded and boxed out in the garage, and feet will have to be planted firm in work boots, homework and second bedrooms. How thoughts will begin with them but end with me. They tried to get pregnant after the photographer left the room. I was there hovering - in the way I did then - and willed the tiny possibility of me to shoot forward. I'd heard the old wives' tales thousands of times, if I could make her fall in love with him she'd be a better receptacle for me. I kissed her neck and whispered her favourite narratives borrowed from the songs and movies she coveted. And because I made her believe this was meant, it happened. Later, she'd say, I arrived just the way she'd planned and that her prayers were answered.
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Have you imagined the space and time before you were born? I’d love to hear from you.
I loved the poem and the story. I still cherish the photos of my parents’ honeymoon in 1946.
This brought tears to my eyes. I often think about how my sons have no knowledge of who I was before they came along. I have wonderful photos of my parents when they lived in Poncé, Puerto Rico, for the first two years of their marriage, where my dad worked before I was born, and even after I was conceived. For my mother, who grew up in a very small town at the base of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, this must have seemed like an extraordinarily glamorous existence. Indeed, the pictures show her in glam bathing suits and sunglasses reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy, who had just tragically become a widow, with my dad gazing adoringly at her through his bottle-thick "engineer" glasses.