An alien crowd of nurses, residents, attending physicians,
and machines and carts careened and hummed everywhere around his wife. If she had
needed her husband during her labor, if she had hopes of counting on him, well, as usual, he was completely useless. Oh, he’d taken the birthing classes, worried himself
crazy, and had tried to be attentive for months. It was no use. In the end,
apart from a few ice chips he fed her on cue, she was on her own again,
struggling with absolute physical and spiritual courage, getting things done
because nobody else was going to do them.
Watching
helplessly and unhelpfully as she went through her labor, he kept thinking of
those urban legends in which a mother finds, miraculously, the strength to lift
an automobile to get her child out of danger. And so, thanks to this
kind of courageousness, their only child was born, from strength and sheer resolve.
Somehow in all the uncomfortable maze, glare, and welter, a nurse found him
cowering in the corner by a cart. Everything was moving fast; he found it hard to keep up with what was going on, with what he was even thinking. Above all, he was crying, crying a lot, something he had really never done before. It surprised him almost as much as the unfathomable process of childbirth. A nurse took him by the crook of the
arm. She stuck the odd, unbalanced eyes of a sleek, gleaming surgical pair of
scissors into his shaking, damp hand without even looking to see where his fingers were
and said, no doubt having said it many, many times before, “Dad? You want to
cut the umbilical cord?” And this is what he answered:
“Sure.”
If
the word “sure” has anything to do with certainty, it’s a funny business that a man can
say it when he’s least certain.
*
One of my favorite
poets is Delmore Schwartz, and one of my favorite poems by him is a sonnet,
“The Beautiful American Word, Sure.”
The beautiful American word,
Sure,
As I have come into a room,
and touch
The lamp’s button, and the
light blooms with such
Certainty where the darkness
loomed before,
As I care for what I do not
know, and care
Knowing for little she might
not have been,
And for how little she would
be unseen,
The intercourse of lives
miraculous and dear.
Where the light is, and each
thing clear,
Separate from all others,
standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch
whatever’s near,
And hope for day when the
whole world has that grace:
For what assures her present
every year?
In dark accidents the mind’s
sufficient grace.
There can be no doubt but that at the instant of the cutting, the brand-new dad in my vignette had a feeling exactly like what
Delmore describes in the first stanza of his poem: something would have switched on in him,
after which light bloomed. After all the months of uncertainty during our couple's pregnancy—the
worry and stress—there
was now, and maybe just for now, certainty.
The second stanza
is too complex to manhandle, and too delicately built for the crudities of armchair lit-crit. Yet that
gorgeous line, “The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear,” occurs just past
the poem’s midpoint. And it leads to a place where life gets shorter, to a
place in the poem in which the quatrains rush into tercets because time is
going to run out, something all parents feel keenly. Nevertheless, it’s a place
“where the light is, and each thing clear,/separate from all others, standing
in its place. . . .” One of the many chaotic things that happen during a birth
is an alternation of the sense of time. On the one hand, waiting, and plenty of
it; on the other, things go by so fast, you scarcely feel present in any
moment. You take in what you can take in: “I drink the time and touch
whatever’s near . . . ”—your wife, your new baby, your in-laws arriving just
late enough to have missed the crowning—“And hope for the day when the whole
world has that face,” the innocent, wanting face of a baby.
It is often, if not usually the case, that a man has never had
“sufficient grace” until he sees a woman give birth, and meets his son or daughter for the
first time, under the certain and steadying guidance of a stronger presence. Readers of poetry are very blessed this way. Even at the other end of our lives, we can fortify ourselves by recalling Dante's guide, Virgil, and then his beloved Beatrice, ferrying him into a new life, a new world. Each langauge, each poetry has its own beauty and wisdom. But I don’t know what word exists in other languages for the assent and faith, right in the heart of doubt, that
is spelled out in the beautiful American word, sure.
Ours is a word
rhymed, in Delmore Schwartz’s poem, with these kindred words: care, dear,
clear, near, year. No dictionary of any language in the world will tell me (and
believe me, I’ve searched) all the things that “sure” can possibly mean. But a
poem, with its family of rhymes and little nervous miracles, gives a reader just
about everything he needs to be more sure of himself, and of those around him.
— Don Share
Pictured: Delmore Schwartz and Mr. and Mrs. James Agee, on their way!