borrowed words.

May 13, 2019
peonies in a white pitcher

Dinghy floating on top of its ocean
liner, the way we must look like adult and pup
sea lions, beached and snoozing, or else
an asp on a heat rock, or a couple of grubs,
you on me like a stone on a stone,
how it’s almost like it was
only now you can fall from me
and we don’t share any organs
though we must long to, or should I say
I long to, and from this delicate position
I have learned what my body is for,
from an eleven-day-old! You, my Albert,
on me now like a daybreak inamorato,
so unfamiliar I can only just remember
your formal name.

An excerpt from Anna McDonald’s poem “Cairn at 4 A.M.” The full poem appears in the May 20th New Yorker.

The sweetest reminder of certain cairns of our own, at 7:00 am and 9:00 am and 3:00 pm and 7:00 pm, and in every other bleary-eyed moment in between. Nearly five full years ago—it’s still a wonder, is all.

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3 Comments

  • Reply Doe May 13, 2019 at 6:33 pm

    lovely
    so many memories
    stacks of rocks
    stacks of babies
    stacks of girls
    and all of you now women

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  • Reply Helen May 14, 2019 at 2:11 pm

    So beautiful. I wrote a letter to my daughter when I weaned her—to be read later of course, though she will likely be embarrassed by it— describing what it meant to me to nurse her. But I also realized that she would remember none of it and it would really be my bittersweet memory to recall. It’s good to write and describe and photograph these moments, even if it’s just we parents who will want to revisit them again one day.

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  • Reply McKenzie Allyshia May 18, 2019 at 8:48 pm

    This is positively beautiful ♥ I had to check out the full poem and it was just wonderful.

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