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Frozen Sperm & Frozen Eggs

My mother and I 
from the kitchen table
tune in Oprah. Her
guest is forty, and she's
sparring with her Ex
over frozen sperm.
The audience torpedoes 
an ethics professor
who dubs her progeny 
"souvenir babies." 
They cheer instead 
for the grieving couple 
who've rented a womb 
for their daughter's
frozen egg, an unborn 
orphan left behind 
in a cancer clash.

"Who'd tell those stories
on themselves?" my mother
asks. She's always had 
a husband, blitzed by men
when she was young. She
doesn't understand those
who'd trade the delicate
whistle of a phallus
for a ghost at the end
of a loveless match.

She doesn't understand
the pathology of Alone.
How it is to be a blank
on the calendar that's
never pencilled in,
a platter of salmon served
to nibbling strangers, 
delving in for the center
cut, leaving limes
and fins for the clean-up 
crew. How it is to be
a player in some 
Broadway version of 
Don't Kiss Me Kate, every 
actor in his fifteen 
minutes of fame, the night 
stretched out in an endless 
Warhol film, looped to
replay, replay.

"Who'd want a frozen
egg, a frozen sperm?"
my mother asks, swabbing
honey in her cup.
I add lemon to my tea
and say, "We'd do anything 
to get that little fuse 
that sets our womb
ticking again."

Credits: Appeared in the anthology
And What Great Beast, Poems at the End of the Century.

Cradlesong

For Michael and Alex Smith drowned,
October 25, 1995

Clouds pull taut lakeside, hold back 
a blue so bright that sun seems 
painted on pontoons. I drowse 
in a wooden chair as skiffs melt 
into ripples at the shore. Inside 
the clubhouse, scallops wait, strapped 
in bacon. The baby crabs drown in sauce.

As the sky leadens at the water's 
edge, ducks drift effortlessly
along the lip of the lake. 
The DJ spins Little Richard's 
fifties hits, and I think of that dance 
at the other lake, somewhere 
in the Carolinas, where Alex 
and Michael's soft shoe shuffle
went Slippin n' Slidin'.

Under a cracked plate of moon, 
they slipped into the water,
strapped in their car seats, bobbed
inside the ugly bubble. A careful 
mother's eyes dogged theirs 
at the rear window till the car 
upended in the mud. Gray gurgled 
at the window like ripples in a bath. 
Shades lowered for an early sleep. 

When the water broke, their feet
clattered like tambourines on the dash.
Their voices, trumpets of terror, 
snuffed into sputters, alone
floating in the amneotic night.

© All Copyright, 1999, Marilyn Bates.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.