Insomnia Math

For Anne Violet

I lie awake most of the night, measuring
and adding up seam allowances in my head.
Will the quilt top come out crooked?
Will I have to add strange trimmings so it will fit the bed?

Then, I count back the months from your birth
to discover the month of your conception.
What knocked our parents off their eight year
track of babies born in early winter?

When I raise my head to turn the pillow,
warm to cool, three lights blink across the fields.
Daybreak—dream slide—I realize the cistern depth
of questions I never thought to ask.

In those too many months between our births
we lost our first home and moved into the cottage
converted from a barn. Years later, one aunt said,
Your father was never very good with money, then sighed.

I imagine you that spring, anxious to be born,
twirling and untwirling on your cord, wanting
some way out, your tiny heel hard
against the placental wall.

Will the quilt top come out too big?
Will I have to cut the edges down to size?
Will this be the spring that comes so early
it signals the end of predictable seasons?

For decades we told the story of the shorting wire in the walls.
Until a neighbor who’d been there told one of us,
about the iron the fire fighters found still plugged in—
how they realized it had fallen and lit something on the floor on fire.

And in minutes, the barn-turned-house was up in flames
And Mum was stumbling down the burning stairs
with you in her arms, staircase crashing down behind her,
her nose and eyebrows singed; the tips of her short hair burned.

We’ve spent a lifetime not questioning the gap between
your life and mine. How that space spills across the calendar
each year. And we’ve never spoken of how, even so, we felt
the great grey cloud of her resentment hovering.

Coyotes are howling by the pond. It’s difficult to count their voices
in the dark—the way they climb over each other’s crying. I’m thinking
of how, in less than one year, another home was gone. Imagine you,
restless in her arms and the rest of us a brood of chicks around her thighs.

What did it mean to her to have become the instrument of our loss
by virtue of neglect or whatever her Catholic conscience called it?
We were twice homeless and this time it was not our father’s fault.
And after? How did she live with the perpetuated iron lie?

It’s almost dawn and the barred owls work the woods
with their insistent call, Who cooks for you?
as I count again, trying to measure out the guilt she carried,
the unnecessary shame. Let’s say we have always held the answers

to her incessant sorrow at arms’ length. Let’s say the self-made
shadows in her heart always merged with that unmeasurable dark.

 

 



Click here to read Miriam O'Neal on the origin of the poem.

 

Image: photo by Dinh Pham on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.

Miriam O’Neal:

“Insomnia Math” rose from the experience of being unable to sleep after a day of writing and an evening cutting pieces for a quilt. It will be the fourth quilt I’ve ever made and the craziest. The fabrics are all the same weight, but their patterns are wildly varied. And I am doing everything, cutting, piecing, and sewing the blocks, plus the backing and quilting by hand. So many opportunities to make an error in math…

The true story of the fire that burned our house to the ground when I was two and my sister was a newborn had only recently come into focus after a lifetime of a myth. And I’ve been exploring what it represents. I wanted to use that phrase ‘the iron lie’ for its double meaning. It was the iron that started the fire and it was an iron-clad story that the fire had been started by an electrical short in the wall of the old house; a story that absolved our poor mother of any guilt for what happened. Though we never would have blamed her, she blamed herself and that created a shadow whose source I never understood until now.

All that night, my mind jumped back and forth between the facts of the story and the demands of the quilt; the distant past and the immediate moment. Something about getting them both right felt necessary for my peace of mind. The poem is in four line stanzas because I wanted to imitate (loosely) the rectangular blocks of the quilt’s pattern. The last couplet felt organic and necessary, as if I had indeed, run over or run short of my planned shape. It’s pinned to the backing now. The quilting will come next.

Miriam O'Neal
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