January 5: New Year, Julianna Baggott, "Eve Recalls Birthing and Her Discovery of Metaphor"

It is a new year, and I'm planning to change the line-up for Saint Marty.  I'm getting a little tired of the current Sunday through Saturday schedule.  I'm not sure what I'm going to keep and what I'm going to mothball.  I want to get back to the roots of this blog, when I was writing about saints.  That's going to happen in some way.  But I'm not sure how just yet.  I just wanted to make you aware of some kind of shakeup.

I have a new poem for the first Monday of the new year.  It comes from one of my favorite poets:  Julianna Baggott.  I received a copy of her collection Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees for Christmas, and it has been changing me, poem-by-poem.  It's, basically, a meditation of poems, poetry, and poets.  So smart and moving.

Saint Marty wants to be Julianna Baggott when he grows up.

Eve Recalls Birthing and Her Discovery of Metaphor

by:  Julianna Baggott

My baby's purple head newly wrung of blood
reddened.  Adam rubbed his body dry, no longer fish-like,

while I fisted my own stomach, to push out
the shining clots as dark red and bruised, ground-rotting apples,

my stomach, too, like the softened fruit, the way only the skin
     holds shape
when the inside has turned to meal.  My belly dull-colored,

almost gray and empty, I was the first to see how one thing
stands sadly for another, emotion mingling sweetly,

cruelly with the world.  I knew what it was to be
not free, but freed from, to be the garden left behind,

not just the willow, but all the sagged limbs weeping.

A great Christmas present