Her Dress

I found a tiny dress in my closet today. It had been covered by a white plastic bag and was burried between a coat I wore during pregnancy and one I had outgrown then. A woman who owns a bed and breakfast in Colorodo made it by hand. She makes tiny dresses and bonnets for children at her local NICU - dresses and bonnets in which the babies are sometimes burried. When Amaly was dying, our friend, Nancy, the carnio sacral therapist who was helping Amaly had it made for her. The little dress resembles one a child might be christened in, with its glistening white cotton and slight touches of lace and pink ribbon. Today as I pulled back the bag and saw it with the eyes of mourning only two and a half years old, the dress made me see once again...

Amaly's whitering body floating
in the dress, a well of
joy fighting to take its
place amidst our misery
as we played dress up
and for this fragment of time
she was royalty - a small princess
that reigned our lives with
love's iron rule
of endurance
where we were an entire pueblo
of loyal subjects scrambling
to please her whims
her eyes sparkled in the play of
of the moment
I could not bring myself
to take a picture of her that way
I felt guilty for playing and
feeling such happiness
I simply took it off
tucked our fleeting joy into a bag
with the hope John had given me
that another living child
might wear it again
and resumed to marvel
at my daughter Amaly's beauty
dressed in the dignity of death

Sleep

She had her first nightmare just now. Perhaps not her first nightmare, but the first she could articulate. I heard a scream that fully awakened my mother's alarm. "Mima, atutes peto." In other words, "Mima me asusto un perro." I brought her to our bed where she could not find her sleep until she was nestled beneath her father's armpit. There they lay. Both of them, likely unlikelys - her for being here despite our grief over losing Amaly, and him for fathering at 50. Is it trite to think of things in terms of destiny? They share the same face, the same color. They are what fill my life with the sentiments of humanity - cariño, dolor, comprension, angustia, amor. Each walking through the circle of their sleep and inhabiting mine, where we are connected, engaged, and then distanced. I do not know what he dreams. He himself, rarely remembers except for when he dreams of playing basketball again. I know that she giggles often and kicks as if she is running. And now I know that a dog was attacking her. I am unable to really dream since she was born. Her frequent night wakenings have nearly driven me mad. I was told that when the mnd/body cannot enter REM sleep it goes into a psychosis. For now, they are sleeping and I am writing - a kind of dreamlike bliss for me one way or another.

Fuzz

Her favorite fuzzy things - Max, Gismonti, Papi's beard (not shown) and Titi Manenena's monstruo slippers...