Beauty

perspective changes with time as does our understanding of beauty

When I was nineteen

In the pre-dawn hours

We gathered near the coast

For my first trip into the oilfields

A galley hand/kitchen slave,

Ready to put in two weeks of

twelve hour days

On the drilling rig

minimum wage plus overtime after forty

Four-twenty-five an hour

A leg up and way off the streets.

The nerves almost got me

Smoked a joint in Buda

Company man demanded we piss clean

So I pounded coffee and water till it was coming out as fast as it came in

And it was so clear

I’d have chilled it and drank it again

All I could do was wait for things beyond my control to resolve themselves

And hope that I would still have a job, that would get me a home,

Thousands of miles away from my family and all the life I knew

Forging my own new life from breath and blood.

Somehow I passed

I passed.

The helicopter pilot welcomed me into the seat beside him

And physics and gasoline lifted us into the sky

The trees below us caught the running lights and

seemed inches away as we skimmed the branches on takeoff.

I could see a distant haze of sunrise in the Gulf,

Nothing special for a florida boy,

The Atlantic is so much prettier

But we flew

straight into it

at a hundred miles an hour

Between the shore and the drilling fields

Where the water met the sky

As the morning sun climbed above the clouds

Light reached through them and touched the water

Like golden fingers of God breathing life into the ocean

Strange dark shapes moved in mysterious patterns

Just below the surface

And every color I’d ever seen or imagined

Had a place in the tapestry of light and life laid out before me

For twenty years that was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,

from Mexico to Minnesota,

Palm Bay to Paris,

Georgia to Germany,

I searched

And believe me,

Nothing else came close.

Then she got pregnant

And sick

Depression, nausea, diabetes, pain,

And we spent nine months of misery

To spend twelve hours of agony

Trying to shove my daughter’s head through

Her mother’s narrow hips

Before resorting to the steel and blood

And risk and recovery

Of a cesarean section.

And I held her hand

And comforted her

And made her laugh

And made her promises

And no matter what else has happened in my life

I kept those at least

Then they pulled the tiny body out and took it to be measured

And she asked me how she was

And I didn’t hear any crying

And the nurses were speaking in low tones

With the focus and intensity of a NASCAR pit crew

Huddled together

Blocking her from my view

Masks and glasses hiding their expressions

“What’s going on?”

Nobody answered.

“Is everything okay?”

The anesthesiologist told me my wife was fine.

I left her to go to the table

Two nurses fretted over a tiny pink creature

With a lumpy, discolored head and patches of thin, scraggly hair.

Caul-covered, quiet,

And completely motionless.

“Is she okay?”

“Everything is fine, she just isn’t breathing.”

“Sometimes this happens when the mother is on antidepressants.”

All I could do was wait for things beyond my control to resolve themselves

And hope I’d have a daughter, wife, and happy home tomorrow.

That we would welcome this new life into the home we built with breath and blood.

I watched their fingers move like concert pianists

Across instruments and swabs and stethoscopes and her frail body

And I begged the indifferent universe to please, PLEASE let me meet and know my daughter.

Ten thousand years passed

I stared with a heart as still as yours and sent all my years into you

Streaming like golden fingers breathing my life into your body

“Take me, give her a chance”

and I know it didn’t help as much as the nurses,

and expensive equipment

but you started breathing

Somehow it passed

We passed.

Your tiny belly pumped like an industrial bellows,

and your purple face turned pink,

then bright red

as you announced your arrival to the world.

Laying there, red and splotchy, sticky with ichor.

Lumpy and bruised and stinking and frail,

Screaming…

A fighter with too much heart to ever consider giving up,

You bumped that ocean view to number two.

And believe me,

It isn’t even close.