James: A Poem about Stillbirth, By Lise Gaston
This city's occasional snow demands we slow down
five minutes more out the door into its muffling
unexpected crush. I have been slowing since July
since the small pulsing furl of him stopped in me.
Name chosen in a sunlit instant stunned with weeping
in the hospital room, only one heart left beating.
A boy the doctor tells us, right before
numbing my belly, before the still unwritable scene.
We had been saving the surprise, assuming
a whole lifetime of gender.
Back in the birthing suite this bardo of his body stilled
but still inside mine, the choice comes quick as all other
unchosen in those cruel bright hours between losing him
and losing him: between diagnosis, black and white
and relentless, and the long push that brings him
into this world, to exit him into this world.
I first float Cedar, the room holding us, the only
reality I can render, also that heady warmth —
then James, your middle name but not on our optimistic list,
wary of vulgar variations. Now he will never have
a nickname we cannot control. Agreed in a moment then
a sound quickly foreign in the social worker's mouth,
she's trained to name what's already lost before
he enters here. The name of a chance
(everyone thought he'd be a girl) now written
on the certificate of remembrance,
the hospital bracelet never meant to fit, all the bits
of paper they give us because we cannot keep
what counts. You steal the tape measure that held
each inch. The sky's off-white as a page.
Medical instructions: take it easy,
no swimming: that last too late, came after
I had dipped my bleeding body
in the ocean to remember the sweet swell he made,
loss traced in salt. We thought he left
this world unmarked save the trace of ash, footprints
inked and smudged and rushing their way somewhere else.
Time rolls out like the tide. Small drawers
of his imagined future shut. Two months old today,
I would have shown him his first snow, the quiet light.
My reckless imagination. We didn't consider
how this name would be with us a lifetime longer
than his, just ended: the name my mother will
have tattooed on her calf, the name my sisters
will remember to say, the name on donation slips
in memory — The quick hot guilt that rises now
when I think how swift we were in naming,
how incapacitated. But when his soft and silent
body arrived into this unsafe world, feet curved —
unwalkable and perfect — he looked like his name.
About Lise Gaston
Lise Gaston won the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize for James and received $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts to attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Her work has been published by CBC Books. Lise is also the author of Cityscapes in Mating Season, which was named one of the 10 must-read books of 2017 by the League of Canadian Poets. Her other recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brick, Canadian Notes and Queries, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review and Best Canadian Poetry in English. Gaston lives in Vancouver. Please read more about Lise on her website.
