ULTRASOUND

This week my wife and I went to get an ultrasound to see our baby. We found out that we are having a little girl. Nothing can prepare you for seeing YOUR child up there. It wasn't in 3D and reading an ultrasound is a tough business with shadows and shifting movements of the baby, but seeing her face, her little hands and feet, it took my breath away.

I am a quiet person by nature. In the last few days, I have said less than usual, lost in my own world.

This is a blog about poetry. That was my intention when I began. For a year now I have been trying to finish up my first book of poems, a manuscript called POSTAGE. With the birth of my child coming, I have done it and there's not much that you can say to equate that for someone who isn't a poet. It took a long time, I guess, you might say.

When I found we were going to get an ultrasound last week, it struck me how strange that is. You "see" essentially what is heard. You "see" the vibration of all the water in the mother splashing against the organs and a picture is transmitted.

Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral," which I reread today, always surprises me even though I know how it ends. Seeing is believing for someone us. For others, it is only a starting place.