Midwife, by Claudia Emerson

something they must remember
and will in the telling
and retelling they are I am
for a while now
sure this sure of it
~Claudia Emerson

Midwife, by Claudia Emerson on Linebreak 

I've been subscribed to the one poem a week literary magazine, Linebreak, for years now. Most often the issue appears in my inbox and I pass it off. I turk it away in some hidden email folder, or I delete. I've probably missed some beautiful poems. Well, not anymore! I am going to make a concerted effort to read Linebreak every week. It's just one poem a week...right? Can't be that difficult.

This weeks poem is by Claudia Emerson. Midwife is beautiful and evocative. The images are crisp and there is a bevy of imaginal energy.

The poem starts off pretty unassuming in the first three stanzas. We have a pregnant women in Tennessee farmland. They don't seem to understand the immensity of the task they have before them. But not the speaker, she decides "to learn it." One could assume that she is learning about child birth because of how many women in her home town are getting pregnant, but I read it as she is "learning it" because she is one of these pregnant women. She is going to experience this and needs to understand what is going to happen. She doesn't want to fear the "white florescence," the "sterile forceps," and the "needles;" so she learns about child birth.

So, she does. She studies. Most of the cases she looks at are standard, normal. But then she gives us the turn in the poem where she begins to discuss the rarer cases. In stanza nine she lists possible problems: cord strangling, premature babies, hidden twins, "ones who come fists first," breeches. I love that phrase "fists first" by the way.

When finally she lands upon one singular baby. A baby born in a bread truck. This is where the poem really shifts. It is no longer about this pregnant woman and her situation; she has gone beyond herself and is now experiencing the plight of this family. She, in fact, delivers this baby in the poem. She places herself in this situation.

Their baby, born in a bread truck, is born with his brain exposed, no skull. The baby doesn't live long, but it does have an effect on the people around it. I find it interesting that the speaker does not mention the effect that this child had upon his parents. They seem to disappear from the poem as soon as the speaker delivers this child. Before the child dies, it makes one sound and then the rest of the babies in the nursery echo that sound. This dying child causes a generation of Tennessee babies to learn something about pain and loss. Something about being different. Something about life. He does this through "something not quite language  not quite son." Which is a beautiful phrase too.

The poem has an interesting structure. There are large spaces between words, almost like pseudo line breaks. And the line breaks themselves are interesting, often breaking up sentences. If you read either line by itself it means one thing, but if you read it together it means another. I am a sucker for that kind of thing. There are several images which are really evocative and in subsequent reading got me thinking. Beautiful, just beautiful!