Pregnancy Massage

I take three large pale green pillows
to each pregnancy massage:

once you're on the table, on your side
I pack you in. One goes under your head;

one between your knees, spacing 
bottom leg from top;

and the third is to hug
to your chest. It keeps

the top shoulder from cranking down
and keeps you modest

when I undrape your back.
That's the theory. In fact

This configuration takes on a thousand shapes:
magnifying the sweep of the spine

into a character written with an impudent brush
on my massage table: this woman is

a cedilla, her calves the only 
exception to the 'c';

and this one an extravagant
'h' in the insular script,

a splendid lumbar lordosis
kicking the ass way back 

while the top thigh 
reaches high and forward.

I never know what you
will write, or whether 

you will hug the table
or the sky. The belly 

argues with its own logic,
yours and not yours.

We all start here, in 
the warm, swollen fruit

of aching flesh,
carried on diagonals

of endless variation.
Above, the ribs rise and fall,

and the strapping-tape abdominals
stagger like a little man 

carrying groceries. But each
of you, having written

a glorious letter of your own,
sighs "oh, this is comfortable!"

As if I had planned it all.
I fuss and tuck and adjust

to support the illusion;
but you are writing this letter,

you are building this house, and these, my hands,
are yours.

Four Poems


Crippled

We are ancient, crippled with sin,
our knuckles swollen with fear:
our dowager's hump of resentment
keeps us from lifting our heads.
We hobble through the green world muttering
indistinguishable imprecations.


The Moon Behind the Door

High half moon at dawn:
cobweb clouds, full of dust, cling
to the furniture of heaven.


Strange Coin

You were a girl a year ago. And now
womanhood has come to you:
large leaking breasts, battle-scarred
belly, plum-colored
shadows under the eyes. You have become
beautiful and mortal,
robbed of sleep, drawn by us
into the company of death.
You have given hostages
and are at the mercy now of newspapers,
insurance forms, conscriptions. You will never
be free again. Belittled,
vulnerable to every worldly power,
bound to pettiness. A little greedy sucking mouth
owns your nipples: she will never love you
as you love her. You have given everything,
and you've been paid in strange coin,
not recognized as currency.


What To Take With You

I'm pretty sure that on our flight out
we're allowed only a carry-on bag,
and that our personalities
are too big for it. But I hope
we get to pack the sun and the moon
and a few favorite stars,
the rose-stained eggshell cloud
snagged on the mountain,
the rain lifting on the morning wind,
and the brightness of our lovers' eyes.

A Change in the Weather

Cold this morning. A cloudy cover in the middle air. I love this, above all, about the maritime Northwest: a cold day can arrive in late July, just as a comfortable shirtsleeve day can arrive in late January. Nowhere in the world, that I know of, is one less hemmed in by one particular weather. Late winter and late summer in Connecticut were horribly oppressive: whether it was bitter cold or baking hot, it was simply going to stay that way for weeks. There was no appeal from it, no chance of waking up to find yourself at the far end of the weather-calendar.

It's true, it can rain for weeks at a time here, dark and wet beyond the conception or endurance of transcascadian Americans. But -- if you don't infect your mind with weather reports -- you go to bed each night knowing that tomorrow could miraculously be a beautiful Spring day, no matter what month you're in.

I kneel at the foot of the table. Spurt oil into my hand from the bottle at my waist, in a quick movement that has become entirely unconscious for me, and stroke her feet lovingly. Feet inspire a special tenderness in me. They labor in hidden pain or discomfort, bearing the brunt of work days. They're banished from the light and air, crammed into oppressive spaces, made to work but given no chance to stretch and breathe. And yet they have all the sensitivity and beauty of hands. They're so surprised and grateful to find themselves touched and kneaded. Sometimes you can feel the tension of the whole body move down through the feet and depart in a light shuddery gasp of relief.

They're all the more important in late pregnancy, when you're being cautious about the legs and thighs, and this is the only place caudal to the the glutes that you can still do heavy work. If the sadness of the lower limbs is going to find a way out, it will have to find it here.

I'm doing a lot of pregnancy massage these days. Probably my favorite work. It's frustrating, though, dealing with so-called "pelvic instability," the pain associated with the greater play in the pelvic bones. I'm morally certain I know where the trouble is, that it's thigh trigger points shortening the adductors and hamstrings, overwhelming the relatively weak external rotators (which is why, startlingly, it more often afflicts people in good shape, especially the swimmers and cyclers who train those inner thigh muscles extensively, than sedentary people) -- but deep work in the thighs is precisely what we're forbidden to do, until a couple weeks after delivery. All I can do is recommend the stretches and exercises in the book by Cecile Röst, and make sure the glutes and external rotators are as clear as I can make them.

A little light brushing up the extensor tendons on top of the foot. Supposedly it inspires the lymphatic system. It feels right, anyway. She's wandering back and forth across the line into sleep, as pregnant women so often do, but she doesn't seem to startle when she crosses. When I come back to the head of the table, lay a hand on her shoulder, and murmur, "time to roll over," her eyes open and she comes back to this world, visibly but easily. The faintest of smiles lights her face. I unpack the pillows, and she carefully turns, holding her full belly in her hands, and settles again with a sigh. I pack her in again, and in moments she's wandered back into sleep.

Wanderer

She's on her side, with her back to me. I reach under the sheet -- something they taught me never to do, in massage school -- and lay my hand on her taut, baby-full abdomen. Gently stroke backwards, a mild myofascial stretch, helping the bewildered abdominal muscles adjust to being twice their accustomed length. Again. My hand cradles the little one. Straight back, following the grain of her transverse abdominals, then up and back, as the external obliques run, and then down and back, following the internal obliques. The baby shifts a little, and I wonder, as I always do, about this long dream-time in the dark of the womb. The intensity of the tenderness I feel for this little one startles me, quite different in quality from the affection I have for his mother. Spontaneous prayers for his good fortune form in my mind. He could not be more blessed in his parents, but the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place, and his vulnerability staggers me. What a world to wander into, tiny and naked. I hold him for a moment. Om mani padme hum. Behold the jewel in the lotus.

Another part of my mind is assessing: she's in terrific shape. I know the lower paraspinals would love some firm work, but I refrain; you're not supposed to do that, according to the books; so I do some very gentle kneading and holding, and I feel a brief annoyance at how little good information we have. Like most medical massage lore, it's very possibly just made up. If it had to do with expensive drugs you could sell, there'd be half a dozen meticulous (if tendentious) studies on it. As it is, there's no telling: maybe it's just somebody's theory, or it's based on some anecdote that crept into medical texts in the 19th Century, never disputed or verified. I'll try to track it down some day. But anyway, you take no chances with pregnancy massage. On to the legs: just a little edema below the knees; less than most women have late in their eighth month. But clots are possible, especially in the saphenous vein, at this stage -- clots are always possible where there's edema -- so I do gentler work on the legs than I normally would. On the inner leg and thigh, basically just placing my hands, one after the other. Avoid the ankles. This is another possibly bogus restriction. There are acupressure points that are supposed to induce labor, and they include several of my workhorse points; among them the meeting of three ways, where three yin meridians cross at the inner ankle. I suspect that you would have to do things in a particular sequence, at the right time of day in the right season, to induce labor; real acupressure is quite complicated, very far from the magic "push this spot and your headache goes away" of popular imagination; my guess is that your chances of inducing labor by accident are about zero. But another thing I need to know more about. Until I do, no prodding the ankle points.

All this, of course, is just the superficial surface of my mind, the running patter of the conceptual mind. The real work is going on, my hands listening, holding, speaking in their own language.

Halftime. Bathroom break. Not a lot of room in there these days. I go into the living room, look at the photos on the shelves. Her family on a fishing expedition. His mother holding him (three years old) on her lap and reading to him. I lock my hands and stretch, reaching up toward the ceiling, shake out my legs. The toilet flushes; the door clicks. I give her a few moments to get back on the table, tap at the door. Time to do the other side.

She's an old hand at pregnancy massage: she's already got the pillows all arranged. I rest my hands on her shoulder and hip, reconnecting, settling. A familiar sequence of thoughts rises up:

I wasted all my life till now. This is what I should have been doing all along.

No. You couldn't have done this until now. Not wasted. You were preparing for this, though you didn't know it.

Don't be so portentous, Mr Dale. You're just doing a massage. You think too much.

But I am so happy. "I did not know I was so empty, that I could be so full."

New Leaves

I wonder, would it be too weird for a male bodyworker to specialize in pregnancy massage?

I massaged a couple pregnant women last week. The energy of a pregnant body is intoxicating. Everything's at a high burn. The tissues are fierce and exultant, like the new leaves of Spring: my fingertips start tingling six inches away from the skin. The body's not living for itself anymore. It's doing the most fundamental and necessary thing it ever does, biologically speaking, and every other consideration goes to the wall. It's painfully awake; just being near it wakes me up too.

Meanwhile the mechanical structure of the body is changing radically. The center of gravity is shifting. Ligaments are loosening, and at the same time carrying unaccustomed loads; muscles are working with stresses and at angles they've never handled before. Bodywork is clearly called for. My friend Lekshe tells me that in Nepal pregnant women get massage daily, as a matter of course. Seems ordinary common sense to me. There's not just the discomfort and knotting inevitable with unusual muscular exertion. All the body's proprioception has to be rewired: it literally doesn't know exactly where it is anymore. Massage is exactly what it needs.

I always feel grateful, when I get to do a massage. But especially so, in this case. The body is always a mystery, in the religious sense. Just a little more vividly so, when it's pregnant.