Milk, by Eleanore Lee
Eleanore Lee has been writing fiction and poetry for many years in addition to her regular job as a legislative analyst for the University of California system. Her work has appeared in a range of journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Medicine and Meaning, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Portland Review, and Tampa Review. She was selected as an International Merit Award Winner in Atlanta Review’s 2008 International Poetry Competition and also won first place in the November 2009 California State Poetry Society contest.
Author Foreword:
The poem is about breastfeeding a baby: what it feels like, what meaning it has for the nursing parent. I felt moved to write it due to the blatant lack of literature on it. Many of us also have held down regular jobs while managing the mechanics of scheduling, pumping milk, and refrigerating it in office refrigerators, etc. I had the experience of getting a work call from our Governor’s office when I was in my office pumping my breasts. Very strange! So, this was written rather immediately and spontaneously in response to strong feelings. I made no attempt to share it with anyone for several years because it felt so personal. But now I feel ready.
I.
Roar of an ancient ocean drawn
And moved by the moon.
It was here first—
Before annual statements of profit and loss.
Before airports or truck stops or the increasingly significant
microchip industry,
A warm and secret sea whose
Scented and rhythmic
Heave and flow
Is
Beneath the thin skin of our ways.
Below pavement and parking lot.
Beneath the flesh.
They brought the child to her.
And for the first time
She saw
The pinched face
Whose slate gray eyes looked past her.
The baby smelled of chemicals and pain.
Slowly she unwound the cloths
And spread out skinny toes and fingers.
Bowed legs my little frog.
She gave life and on the third day
The milk came in.
The crying is stilled and peace drops
Like a curtain.
II.
Outside it grows dark and the streetlights
Light
Reflecting off wet sidewalks far below.
It is almost five and my breasts burst and drip.
(The baby is awake and waiting.)
The workplace hums and sighs
With ringing phones and soft voices.
Outside the rain streams soundlessly down the glass.
(I know your voice is raised now.
Gummy toothless squint-eyed bawler.
You can’t even make tears yet.
What do you know?
Like children skull-eyed
In distant lands
How are you to know?
Like them,
You know what you need to live.)
My shirt’s soaked through.
Trapped in this shaft of steel and stone and glass,
I watch the clock hand move
And wait to be with you.
III.
Abraham,
Sparing his beloved son Isaac,
Sacrificed the ram.
There’s nothing noble about the cow or goat.
Milk-givers,
How many epics were written of them, after all?
Basically clean, companions of man,
Kosher.
Loving of brambles and buttercups.
The goat aggressive in her way.
The cow diffident and slow.
Both capable of great stubbornness,
Neither having made a reputation in war.
They figure in the Bible along with sheep and wives
As a sign of great richness.
Our fathers slaughtered goats to honor
First the gods,
Then God.
Spilled blood on the altar.
No man ever made a miracle of milk
Like water into wine or
Wine to blood.
(Like the blood that told me month by month
You had not yet come.)
Simple as human kindness,
No man has lived without it.
IV.
I’m here
Small red and mottled burden
Damp hot and salty
Hair glued eyes squeezed tight shut
Mouth wide
Nuzzling and rooting
Rosebud mouth sweet breath
Milk blister
My fingers clumsy on the buttons.
Flesh on flesh
At last
The gigantic tug
And pull
Suction
Turns me inside out
Pulls me down that dark tunnel
Toward the
Surge and swell.
Rinsed by the warm tide,
Know my power.
