My Mother's Body Read online

  Also by Marge Piercy

  Poetry

  Colors Passing Through Us

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Early Grrrl

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Mars and Her Children

  Available Light

  My Mother’s Body

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  Circles on the Water (Selected Poems)

  The Moon Is Always Female

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

  Living in the Open

  To Be of Use

  4-Telling (with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)

  Hard Loving

  Breaking Camp

  Novels

  Three Women

  Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  The Longings of Women

  He, She and It

  Summer People

  Gone to Soldiers

  Fly Away Home

  Braided Lives

  Vida

  The High Cost of Living

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  Small Changes

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Going Down Fast

  Other

  Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir

  So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and the Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood)

  The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

  Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

  The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1977, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 by Marge Piercy

  “What Makes It Good?” and “We Come Together” copyright © 1985 by Ira Wood, reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Some of these poems were previously published in Barnwood, Bits Press, Cedar Rock, Croton Review, Images, Jam To-Day, Kalliope, Manhattan Poetry Review, Mudfish, Negative Capability, Open Places, Poem the Nukes, Raccoon, Speculative Poetry Review, Star Line, Tarasque, Thirteenth Moon, and Woman of Power.

  “The Chuppah” first appeared in Lilith, the independent Jewish women’s magazine, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, © copyright Lilith Publication, Inc., 1983. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Piercy, Marge. My mother’s body. I. Title.

  PS3566.14M9 1985 811′.54 84-48661

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76139-2

  v3.1

  In Memory of my Mother

  Bert Bernice Bunnin Piercy

  and for my husband

  Ira Wood

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  WHAT REMAINS

  They inhabit me

  The Annuity

  Waking one afternoon in my best dress

  Out of the rubbish

  Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing

  Unbuttoning

  The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte

  Putting the good things away

  The Crunch

  What remains

  My mother’s body

  THE CHUPPAH

  Witnessing a wedding

  Touch tones

  The place where everything changed

  What Makes It Good?

  Why marry at all?

  We Come Together

  Every leaf is a mouth

  The Wine

  The Chuppah

  How we make nice

  House-keeping

  Return of the prodigal darling

  Down

  House built of breath

  The infidelity of sleep

  Nailing up the mezuzah

  CHIAROSCURO

  The good go down

  Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein

  Where is my half-used tube of Tom’s fennel toothpaste tonight?

  Your cats are your children

  Mr. Big

  The maternal instinct at work

  Magic mama

  Nothing more will happen

  Blue Tuesday in August

  The Disinherited

  Cold head, cold heart

  Deferral

  Breaking out

  Paper birds

  Listening to a speech

  Making a will

  Still life

  From HoJo’s to Mr. Softee

  The longings of women

  Out of sight

  Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?

  UNDERRATED PLEASURES

  Building is taming

  Cowering in a corner

  The Listmaker

  Going into town in the storm

  The clumsy season

  Silk confetti

  And whose creature am I?

  In praise of gazebos

  The Faithless

  If I had been called Sabrina or Ann, she said

  The night the moon got drunk

  Sweet ambush

  The high arch of summer

  What we fail to notice

  Tashlich

  This small and intimate place

  How grey, how wet, how cold

  Deer couchant

  Peaches in November

  Six underrated pleasures

  1. Folding sheets

  2. Picking pole beans

  3. Taking a hot bath

  4. Sleeping with cats

  5. Planting bulbs

  6. Canning

  A Note About the Author

  WHAT REMAINS

  They inhabit me

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who choked before they

  could speak their names

  could know their names

  before they had names to know.

  I am owl, the spirit said,

  I swim through the darkness on wide wings.

  I see what is behind me

  as well as what is before.

  In the morning a splash of blood

  on the snow marks where I found

  what I needed. In the mild

  light of day the crows mob

  me, cursing. Are you the daughter

  of my amber clock-tower eyes?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women whose hands were replaced

  by paper flowers, which must be kept

  clean, which could tear on a glance,

  which could not hold even water.

  I am cat. I rub your prejudices

  against the comfortable way they grow.

  I am fastidious, not as a careful

  housewife, but as a careful lover,

  keeping genitals as clean as face.

  I turn up my belly of warm sensuality

  to your fingers, purring my pleasure

  and letting my claws just tip out.

  Are you the daughter of the fierce

  aria of my passion scrawled on the night?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who dreamed that the lover

  would strike like lightning and throw

  them over the saddle and carry them off.

  It was the ambulance that came.

  I am wolf. I call across the miles

  my messages of yearning and hunger, />
  and the snow speaks to me constantly

  of food and want and friend and foe.

  The iron air is heavy with ice

  tweaking my nose and the sound

  of the wind is sharp and whetted.

  Commenting, chatting, calling,

  we run through the net of scents

  querying, Are you my daughter?

  I am pregnant with deaths of certain

  women who curled, wound in the skeins

  of dream, who secreted silk

  from spittle and bound themselves

  in swaddling clothes of shrouds.

  I am raccoon. I thrive in woods,

  I thrive in the alleys of your cities.

  With my little hands I open

  whatever you shut away from me.

  On your garbage I grow glossy.

  Among packs of stray dogs I bare

  my teeth, and the warring rats part.

  I flourish like the ailanthus tree;

  in your trashheaps I dig underground

  castles. Are you my daughter?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who wander slamming doors

  and sighing as if to be overheard,

  talking to themselves like water left

  running, tears dried to table salt.

  They hide in my hair like crabs,

  they are banging on the nodes of my spine

  as on the door of a tardy elevator.

  They want to ride up to the observation

  platform and peer out my eyes for the view.

  All this wanting creates a black hole

  where ghosts and totems whirl and join

  passing through into antimatter of art,

  the alternate universe in which such certain

  deaths as theirs and mine throb with light.

  The Annuity

  1.

  When I was fifteen we moved

  from a tight asbestos shoebox

  to a loose drafty two-story house,

  my own tiny room prized under the eaves.

  My privacy formed like a bud from the wood.

  In my pale green womb I scribbled

  evolving from worm to feral cat,

  gobbling books, secreting bones,

  building a spine one segment

  at a time out of Marx and Freud.

  Across the hall the roomers lived,

  the couple from Appalachia who cooked

  bacon in their room. At a picnic

  she miscarried. I held her

  in foaming blood. Lost twins.

  Salesmen, drab, dirty in the bathroom,

  solitary, with girly magazines,

  detective stories and pads of orders,

  invoices, reports that I would inherit

  to write my poems on;

  overgrown boys dogging you

  out to the backyard with the laundry

  baskets; middle-aged losers with eyes

  that crawled under my clothes

  like fleas and made me itch;

  those who paid on time and those

  with excuses breaking out like pimples

  at the end of the month.

  I slammed my door and left them,

  ants on the dusty plain.

  For the next twenty years

  you toted laundry down two flights,

  cleaned their bathroom every morning,

  scrubbed at the butt burns,

  sponged up the acid of their complaints

  read their palms and gave common

  sense advice, fielded their girlfriends,

  commiserated with their ex-wives,

  lied to their creditors, brewed

  tisanes and told them to eat fruit.

  What did you do with their checks?

  Buy yourself dresses, candy, leisure?

  You saved, waiting for the next depression.

  You salted it away and Father took control,

  investing and then spending as he chose.

  2.

  Months before you died, you had us drive

  south to Florida because you insisted

  you wanted to give me things I must carry back.

  What were they? Some photographs, china

  animals my brother had brought home from

  World War II, a set of silverplate.

  Then the last evening while Father watched

  a game show, you began pulling out dollar

  bills, saying Shush, don’t let him

  see, don’t let him know. A five-dollar

  bill stuffed under the bobbypins,

  ten dollars furled in an umbrella,

  wads of singles in the bottom of closet

  dividers full of clothes. You shoved

  them in my hands, into my purse,

  you thrust them at Woody and me.

  Take, you kept saying, I want you to have

  it, now while I can, take.

  That night in the hotel room

  we sat on the floor counting money

  as if we had robbed a candy store:

  eighteen hundred in nothing larger

  than a twenty, squirreled away, saved

  I can’t stand to imagine how.

  That was the gift you had that felt

  so immense to you we would need a car

  to haul it back, maybe a trailer too,

  the labor of your small deceit

  that you might give me an inheritance,

  that limp wad salvaged from your sweat.

  Waking one afternoon in my best dress

  Until I tasted the blood spurt in my mouth

  bursting its sour clots, and the air

  forced my bucking lungs and I choked,

  I did not know I had been dead.

  The lint of voices consulting over me.

  Didn’t I leave myself to them,

  an inheritance of sugared almond memories,

  wedding cake slabs drying in their heads?

  They carried me home and they ate me,

  angel fluff with icing.

  Now I return coiling and striking

  on the slippery deck of dawn like a water

  snake caught in a net, all fangs

  and scales and slime and lashing tail.

  I have crawled up from dankness

  spitting headstones like broken teeth.

  My breath spoils milk. My eyes

  shine red as Antares in the scorpion’s tail

  and my touch sticks like mud.

  I have been nothing

  who now put on my body like an apron

  facing a sink of greasy dishes.

  Right here pain welded my ribs, here

  my heart still smokes. My life hangs triggered

  ready to trap me if I raise a hand.

  Dresses flap and flutter about me

  while my bones whistle

  and my flesh rusts neuter as iron.

  The rooms of my life wait

  to pack me in boxes.

  My eyes bleed. My eardrums

  are pierced with a hot wire of singing

  that only crows and hawks could harmonize.

  My best dress splits from neck to hem.

  Howling I trot for the brushlands with yellow

  teeth blinking, hair growing out like ragweed

  and new claws clicking on stone

  that I must wear dull

  before I can bear again

  the smell of kitchens

  the smell of love.

  Out of the rubbish

  Among my mother’s things I found

  a bottle-cap flower: the top

  from a ginger ale

  into which had been glued

  crystalline beads from a necklace

  surrounding a blue bauble.

  It is not unattractive,

  this star-shaped posy

  in the wreath of fluted

  aluminum, but it is not

  as a thing of beauty


  that I carried it off.

  A receding vista opens

  of workingclass making do:

  the dress that becomes

  a blouse that becomes

  a doll dress, potholders,

  rags to wash windows.

  Petunias in the tire.

  Remnants of old rugs

  laid down over the holes

  in rugs that had once

  been new when the remnants

  were first old.

  A three-inch birch-bark

  canoe labeled Muskegon,

  little wooden shoes

  souvenirs of Holland, Mich.,

  an ashtray from the Blue Hole,

  reputed bottomless.

  Look out the window

  at the sulphur sky.

  The street is grey as

  newspapers. Rats

  waddle up the alley.

  The air is brown.

  If we make curtains

  of the rose-bedecked table

  cloth, the stain won’t show

  and it will be cheerful,

  cheerful. Paint the wall lime.

  Paint it turquoise, primrose.

  How I used to dream

  in Detroit of deep cobalt,

  of ochre reds, of cadmium

  yellow. I dreamed of sea

  and burning sun, of red

  islands and blue volcanos.

  After she washed the floors

  she used to put down newspapers

  to keep them clean. When

  the newspapers had become

  dirty, the floor beneath

  was no longer clean.

  In the window, ceramic

  bunnies sprouted cactus.

  A burro offered fuchsia.

  In the hat, a wandering Jew.

  That was your grandfather.

  He spoke nine languages.

  Don’t you ever want to

  travel? I did when I

  was younger. Now, what

  would be the point?

  Who would want to meet me?

  I’d be ashamed.

  One night alone she sat

  at her kitchen table

  gluing baubles in a cap.

  When she had finished,

  pleased, she hid it away

  where no one could see.

  Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing

  Our Mardi Gras is this, not before

  a season of fasting dictated once

  by the bare cupboard of late winter,