Water Bird

“What exactly does this “becoming” entail?” ¹
–Renee Gladman, The Sentence As A Space for Living

I

am pregnant with my second child and have found myself unable to write. The weight of her makes me know my spine more intricately than ever before. 20 years prior, I remember a doctor mentioning off-hand did I know I have minor scoliosis? and my mother insisting she’s a swimmer, so that’s the recommended treatment anyways.

Swimming was always a way to defy gravity: floating between the world that tugs at your feet and the one that breathes life into you, insists you proceed anyway. The child is so heavy at times I can’t breathe. I take up swimming to alleviate the pain of being her carrier. Relief is calculated in months that lie ahead. “Months” is just a word I can look at, or tell people about, when really, it’s respite I am after.

When I cannot write, but I experience a drift, I know I can at least make sense of life, if only to write about it later. Through them, the world offers itself to me in a continuous wave, and I cling to the linked meaning I find in books, a place, a stillness, people I meet, memory. I take solace in the act of witness that precedes the act of writing.

After she is born, I read Renee Gladman’s essay, “The Sentence As A Space for Living.” I learn that “We move through language because we place it between ourselves and the world.”² I recognize that a mother, too, is a space for living, and consider the time my daughter spent in my body. How this title, mother, comes between me and the world. How all experience is language in waiting.

---

A man on the subway wearing a hat that says No Hard Feelings. Seeing glimpses of my own stubborn self in Yōko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool. I call them drifts. When I cannot write, but I experience a drift, I know I can at least make sense of life, if only to write about it later. Through them, the world offers itself to me in a continuous wave, and I cling to the linked meaning I find in books, a place, a stillness, people I meet, memory. I take solace in the act of witness that precedes the act of writing.

---

Before my children were born, I watched the entirety of The Sopranos when the weather cooled. I laughed at the mob man and the ducks that visit his pool. This is a still that remains in my imagination, but in the new framework of my life, ducks have taken on an entirely different meaning. I sit and watch them go by as I endure the end of this pregnancy. The baby is due in June; the ducks migrate home in May. We wait. Moving at all is difficult. They do the swimming and share in the waiting until she arrives.

---

What is the opposite of a drift? A canyon: depths of an experience that I cannot access. There is no witness, no sightline in the drop of the valley amid my mountainous mental terrain. While I am pregnant, the canyon I can only glimpse is the event prior to her arrival in my body. Parts of me live in a crater of fear that she will not exist past the space she occupies.

This pregnancy, this nine-month prevention, teaches me that getting to the heart of anything is drifting there, when all time does is mimic itself and there is always something you are after.

Water drifts and carries. If a drift is movement—a constant, slow momentum, where something can be carried between one place and another—a canyon is a fall, a plummet from meaning. I read that most canyons have rivers running through them. I think: a glimpse of hope in the depths.

---

Interviewer: Name something you need in order to write.
Deborah Levy: Water: to swim. Writing and swimming help each other, so I like to be near water, whether just a local public pool or a river or whatever. I will somehow try to organize my writing life so I get a swim in.”³

---

My writing life. Its looming absence is awakened in me as I read books by Kate Zambreno. I am so increasingly uncomfortable in my body that I cannot exist in any form but one that holds on to something: the child inside, the longing to write, the fear. “What prevents a book from being written becomes the book itself,” Zambreno says. This pregnancy, this nine-month prevention, teaches me that getting to the heart of anything is drifting there, when all time does is mimic itself and there is always something you are after. I try to transcribe this immutable thing I chase, but language I cannot form trails behind me.

Zambreno says to a friend: “I was telling myself today … that everything is writing … that reading is writing, taking notes is writing ... ”⁴ I drive to the beach, a book sitting in the passenger seat, and tell myself the same thing.

---

“When you’re writing, a kind of instinct comes into play. What you’re going to write is already there in the darkness.”⁵ While enduring the final months of not being able to write, I pick up Marguerite Duras to read about women and the home and men being additional children. I think this is the information I will need in the future, when I can write again.

Now I remember that I also found in those pages a dispute she has with herself, about whether or not writing is a transition, a translation, a passing between states, and I know now why this book might have come into my hands, via an interview I watched with Deborah Levy. A drift, I think.

Duras wonders if writing is a deciphering from sleep states. “You have in front of you a mass suspended between life and death and entirely dependent upon you.”⁶ Yes, I do I think, looking down at my swollen belly.

---

I am asked a lot of questions before my second daughter is born, but the question I am asked the most is what will you name her? Names are a funny thing. How do we make a word for a person?

Some people think I named my first daughter after New Orleans, where my husband and I honeymooned in a moody November many years prior. Nola, the city that is sinking, the water higher than the land if you look at it from where they tell you, when you stand on city concrete. Weird there, isn’t it? Shouldn’t be like that they told us. Nola, the train through the garden district, a little spooky, very musty, very spooky. Nola, the voodoo and the drunk, the tourist trough slamming boozy slushing slurring looking for Emeril wanting magic, making jazz, slipping through town on a strong lemon scent. See? The two are not the same. Nola was the name my husband wanted, and so she became. Naming your child is, at best, an act of reverence, and it has nothing to do with me. Or so I thought at the time.

---

After a death happens in your body, there is a short period when you are more fertile. “Biologically capable,” I read. My Catholic mother calls them “thin spaces,” where God resides, she says. A life open to more life.

The doctors don’t study women’s health enough to tell you why, exactly, you may be able to get pregnant again quickly after a miscarriage. I think of my doctor saying, “it’s likely because there’s all the stuff in there already to do it anyways.” All the stuff in there. Cells of the prior, embedded within you. Tiny specks of life dust like the rapid dispersion after an explosion: dancing particles made known by light and air and witness.

I am asked a lot of questions before my second daughter is born, but the question I am asked the most is what will you name her? Names are a funny thing. How do we make a word for a person?

I hold myself on this thin strip of space, say I will be saved this pain by the making of another. I fill my womb with hope. It takes four months for the cells to settle and create again.

When she comes home to me, I give her a deliberate name. I know more about this life of hers because it has also held an early death. A canyon. She was so hard to carry in my body.

The name Hanni means “grace of God” because this is how she came to me. I know no other way to justify a death. The particles inside me are made gold by her. When I name this child, it has everything to do with me. I know I know nothing of the true meaning of reverence.

---

We bring her home. I take her to Lake Ontario when the water is at its highest. The ducks are gone now.

---

I am still unable to write. Through sleepless nights, I count drifts.

I think of the time before I had my children, when my mother told me about a prayer she spoke when doing the dishes. It wasn’t until later that I learned the prayer is not verbal: doing the dishes is an act of prayer. Doing the dishes is a kind of prayer because just thinking about God is an act of prayer—I remember learning that from a priest once. This silent prayer is a necessary kind of hoping.

---

In The Spirit of Hope, philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that “only in the deepest despair does true hope arise. The deeper the despair, the more intense the hope.” I think again of the river in the depths. When I am two months postpartum, I unearth the hope to write again and apply for an MFA in creative writing.

---

Year round, I go to the lake. I stop to get a coffee and sit with a book on the creaky orange bench out front. I get distracted from the page to read what the t-shirts passing by are telling me: "gratitude" (not "grateful"); "good luck" with many breathy, sarcastic spaces between the two words, the first positioned near the breast, the other, near the opposite hip ("good … luck"); "summer state of mind." I wonder to myself if the words being expressed on the shirt are truer to the reader or the wearer. I do not know then that I will think of the sarcastic
"good luck" for months to come.

---

Tony Soprano is telling his therapist, Dr. Melfi, that he doesn’t think he needs her anymore. She tells him talking is his cure. “Hope comes in many forms,” she says. “Who has time for that?” he responds. She presses him and he tells her about a dream he had about birds. She asks if they were ducks.

Tony: Those goddamn ducks.
Dr. Melfi: What is it about those ducks that meant so much to you?
Tony: I don’t know, it was just a trip, having those wild creatures come into my pool … their little babies. I was sad to see them go.⁷

A year has passed. Both children are in daycare now. I miss them. I do not know what lies ahead.

---

The translation for “a woman who is pregnant” is unchanging. The translation for “a woman who has had a child” is “mother.”

A mother should not also be a graduate student, thinks my mother’s friend.

“When the girls are still so little? Why would she do that to herself? She’ll drown.”

---

Fall arrives, and with it, school. Writing.

I gaze up at the wind waving the trees like I am inside their ocean. I close my eyes to the movement of the subway train on the tracks. This is me making water of every experience to remain in the drift, where memory and being and moving forward are linked.

The stations pass in and out of my gaze, a rushing sensation like a concentrated zoom backward through my memory. With it, there is the painful pit of recall my mind can only graze. Can story always exist in language?⁸ I still cannot write all of my story. There are always canyons distorting the landscape of my mind, rendering me without full accessibility to words and their meaning. After my daughter is born safely, another canyon appears.

intherethereshertraumaticdeparturefrommybodyandthewishformymindtobesafeinwantingherbut
theneedtofulfillyetanotherthinganotherthinganythingthatisntbeinglikethisbeinganotheragainbeing
anotheragainandsogoesandsogoessogoestheimposingposetheincentivetheinsensetheinittheinthesense
thesenselessnessthesenseofpostpartpostpartpostpartpartdepartdepartdepredepredepredepredpressss
ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

---

I am crying on the subway all the time. Shortly after school starts, I realize I have never consistently travelled so far from my children. Twice a week, I’m several kilometres from where they are, where two hours would pass before I’d home their emergency.

The experience is one of energy. I am crying on the subway all the time because my body is tired and learning to endure new frequencies. I am crying on the subway all the time because I am no longer the carrier. I am crying on the subway all the time because I get to experience being carried again. Relief.

I recall Deborah Levy talk of escalators and I am crying, perhaps, because I see myself invited into the world of my dreaming. Another drift, making a connection from me to the literature I love:

“That spring [ … ] I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upward that did it. From apparently nowhere tears poured out of me and by the time I got to the top and felt the wind rushing in, it took all my effort to stop myself from sobbing [ … ] as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forward and upward was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself.”⁹

---

the world we abide

thinning brilliance, 
a float,
there are four
tucking into another.
bills nooked in tails
arms so wide they span
the size of one hug
left, one hug
right

embrace is a raft here

I stream Tony in abandon,
silken robe,
his waddle to their
swim.
the shock of a chlorine duck
as if to say
where did you come from?
and not the other
way around.

you can’t mess with nature
but you can with people

separately, entwined,
ropes like snakes in slippered
skin. Is hanging a kind
of floating?

think about it this way:
if the sky world is one thing
and the water world, another

why do the ducks live in both?

---

After Islington station the subway goes above ground. It feels impossible to look up and see everyone around me keep their head down, their gaze still on their phones. The light pries mine open. The train jostles me like I am in water.

I am on my way to class, exhausted. The children were up at 4:00 a.m. again today. Beyond the window I see a bird flying alongside the train, racing against our tracks. I have never seen something like this before. There seems to be so much energy propelling it forward.

The difference between water birds and air birds is that one has the bones to float. It is lighter, and, in a sense, needs to be carried. They do not always use their wings to fly, but instead, to drift—and sometimes, to dive into deeper, unknown waters.

---

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Works Cited

  Renee Gladman. “The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture." Tripwire 15, 95-110.

  “Drift, N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/79....

  “Canyon, N.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/17....

  Cummins, Anthony. “Deborah Levy: ‘Writing and Swimming Help Each Other.’” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, May 11, 2024. www.theguardian.com/books...

  Zambreno, Kate. Drifts. Riverhead Books, 2020.

  Duras, Marguerite. Practicalities. Grove Press, 1993. 

  Levy, Deborah. Things I Don’t Want to Know. Hamish Hamilton, 2014.

  “Tony Soprano Tells Dr. Melfi About The Ducks | The Sopranos | HBO.” YouTube, uploaded by HBO, January 5, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?....