My Mother's Body Read online

  but before the diet of thin gruel sun,

  the winter putting it to us like a big

  hard grey boot in the gut,

  the storms that shovel us into their pit,

  the snow that comes down like lace

  and hardens to sludge in the gears:

  A chance to be somebody else

  before cabin fever turns you inside out

  and counts your last resource

  down to its copper head.

  We dress like death whose time

  of ascendance comes with the long

  nights when the white moon freezes

  on the snow and the fox hunts late,

  his tail bannering, kill or starve.

  I like the grinning pumpkinhead,

  the skeleton mocking what will scatter it,

  that puts on the face of its fears

  and rollicks on the dead leaves

  in the yard whooping and yowling.

  Tonight you run in the streets,

  brave because you wear a mask;

  vampires do not worry about rape.

  Witches wander the night like cats.

  We bribe other people’s children

  with sweets not to attack us.

  We put on sheets and cut eyeholes

  although we all know that when ghosts

  come, they wear their old clothes

  and stand suddenly in the hall

  looking for a boot or muse at the window

  or speak abruptly out of their own

  unused and unusable passion.

  For my true dead I say kaddish

  and light the yartzeit candle.

  No, tonight it is our own mortality

  we mock with cartoon grimace,

  our own bones we peel to, dancing,

  our own end we celebrate.

  Long night of sugar and skull

  when we put on death’s clothes

  and play act it like children.

  Unbuttoning

  The buttons lie jumbled in a tin

  that once held good lapsang souchong

  tea from China, smoky as the smell

  from a wood stove in the country,

  leaves opening to flavor and fate.

  As I turn buttons over, they sound

  like strange money being counted

  toward a purchase as I point

  dumbly in a foreign bazaar,

  coins pittering from my hand.

  Buttons are told with the fingers

  like worry beads as I search

  the trove for something small

  and red to fill the missing

  slot on a blouse placket.

  I carried them from my mother’s

  sewing table, a wise legacy

  not only practical but better

  able than fading snapshots

  to conjure buried seasons.

  Button stamped with an anchor

  means my late grade-school pea coat.

  Button in the form of a white

  daisy from a sky blue dress

  she wore, splashed with that flower,

  rouses her face like a rosy dahlia

  bent over me petaled with curls.

  O sunflower hungry for joy

  who turned her face through the years

  bleak, withered, still yearning.

  The tea was a present I brought

  her from New York where she

  had never gone and never would.

  This mauve nub’s from a dress

  once drenched in her blood;

  This, from a coral dress she wore

  the day she taught me that word,

  summer ’41, in Florida:

  “Watch the clipper ships take off

  for Europe. Soon war will come to us.

  “They will not rise so peacefully

  for years. Over there they’re

  killing us and nobody cares.

  Remember always. Coral is built

  of bodies of the dead piled up.”

  Buttons are useful little monuments.

  They fasten and keep decently

  shut and warm. They also open.

  Rattling in my hand, they’re shells

  left by vanished flesh.

  The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte

  for Julian Mason

  The eye of fire and the eye of copper and blood

  glared at each other through the veil of smog:

  I woke from my too soft bed in the too warm motel

  scheduled to rise between them as they tipped,

  a balancing as of two balls at the farthest extremity

  by a juggler momentarily lucky but about to lose one.

  I rose under that influence balanced between blindness

  and sight, between the hammered and nailed structure

  of the self whose ark we labor at to save us

  from drowning in the salty pit of memories

  washed into that sea from distant and eroded

  lives, and that rising tide and falling rain

  in which hungers are circling up to feed.

  I rose from a dream in which I came

  over a burning plain and entered a wood

  in which the corpses were tied up in trees

  for the birds to clean. There I lay on a platform

  awaiting the sharp beaks of the carrion eaters

  for I understood my bones must be released

  and the moon passed over me and drew up my blood

  as mist and the sun passed over me and baked

  the last sweet water from my tissues.

  When the great crow landed on my face I cried

  Not yet, not yet, and the crow asked, Will you not

  give over? and I cried Not yet, not yet.

  I woke on the red clay of Carolina trembling.

  My life felt like a fragile silk chemise

  I pulled on over my head to slip through the day.

  As I stood among weeds and traffic I saw the red

  moon and red sun eyeing each other, rivals

  who should not be in the same room. I hoped

  a moment ripens into death fulfilled

  when I will say Yes, now; but death arrives

  from within, without and sudden as a pasteboard

  box crushed by a foot, and still I balance

  in midlife praying, Not yet, not yet.

  Putting the good things away

  In the drawer were folded fine

  batiste slips embroidered with scrolls

  and posies, edged with handmade

  lace too good for her to wear.

  Daily she put on schmatehs

  fit only to wash the car

  or the windows, rags

  that had never been pretty

  even when new: somewhere

  such dresses are sold only

  to women without money to waste

  on themselves, on pleasure,

  to women who hate their bodies,

  to women whose lives close on them.

  Such dresses come bleached by tears,

  packed in salt like herring.

  Yet she put the good things away

  for the good day that must surely

  come, when promises would open

  like tulips their satin cups

  for her to drink the sweet

  sacramental wine of fulfillment.

  The story shone in her as through

  tinted glass, how the mother

  gave up and did without

  and was in the end crowned

  with what? scallions? crowned

  queen of the dead place

  in the heart where old dreams

  whistle on bone flutes,

  where run-over pets are forgotten,

  where lost stockings go?

  In the coffin she was beautiful

  not because of the undertaker’s

  garish cosmetics but because

  that f
ace at eighty was still

  her face at eighteen peering

  over the drab long dress

  of poverty, clutching a book.

  Where did you read your dreams, Mother?

  Because her expression softened

  from the pucker of disappointment,

  the grimace of swallowed rage,

  she looked a white-haired girl.

  The anger turned inward, the anger

  turned inward, where

  could it go except to make pain?

  It flowed into me with her milk.

  Her anger annealed me.

  I was dipped into the cauldron

  of boiling rage and rose

  a warrior and a witch

  but still vulnerable

  there where she held me.

  She could always wound me

  for she knew the secret places.

  She could always touch me

  for she knew the pressure

  points of pleasure and pain.

  Our minds were woven together.

  I gave her presents and she hid

  them away, wrapped in plastic.

  Too good, she said, too good.

  I’m saving them. So after her death

  I sort them, the ugly things

  that were sufficient for every

  day and the pretty things for which

  no day of hers was ever good enough.

  The Crunch

  Like the cat the doberman has trapped,

  like the rabbit in the fox’s jaws

  we feel the splintering of our bones

  and wait for the moment that still may flash

  the white space between pains

  when we can break free.

  It is the moment of damage

  when already the pricing mind

  tries to estimate cost and odds

  while the nerves lean on their sirens

  but the spine sounds a quiet tone

  of command toward a tunnel of moment

  that drills the air toward escape

  or death. I have been caught.

  Biology is destiny for all alive

  but at the instant of tearing

  open or free, the blood shrieks and

  all my mother’s mothers groan.

  What remains

  These ashes are not the fine dust I imagined.

  The undertaker brings them out from the back

  in a plastic baggie, like supermarket produce.

  I try not to grab, but my need shocks me,

  how I hunger to seize this officially

  labeled garbage and carry you off.

  All the water was vaporized,

  the tears, the blood, the sweat,

  fluids of a juicy, steamy woman

  burnt offering into the humid Florida

  air among cement palm trees with brown

  fronds stuck up top like feather dusters.

  In the wind the palmettoes clatter.

  The air is yellowed with dust.

  I carry you back North where you belong

  through the bumpy black December night

  on the almost empty plane stopping

  at every airport like a dog at posts.

  Now I hold what is left in my hands

  bone bits, segments of the arched skull

  varicolored stones of the body,

  green, copper, beige, black, purple

  fragments of shells eroded by storm

  that slowly color the beach.

  Archeology in a plastic baggie.

  Grit spills into my palms:

  reconstruct your days, your odyssey.

  These are fragments of a smashed mosaic

  that formed the face of a dancer

  with bound feet, cursing in dreams.

  At the marriage of the cat and dog

  I howl under the floor.

  You will chew on each other’s bones

  for years. You cannot read

  the other’s body language.

  On the same diet you starve.

  My longest, oldest love, I have brought

  you home to the land I am dug into.

  I promise a path laid right to you,

  roses to spring from you, herbs nearby,

  the company of my dead cats

  whose language you already know.

  We’ll make your grave by piney woods,

  a fine place to sit and sip wine,

  to take the sun and watch the beans

  grow, the tomatoes swell and redden.

  You will smell rosemary, thyme,

  and the small birds will come.

  I promise to hold you in the mind

  as a cupped hand protects a flame.

  That is nothing to you. You cannot

  hear. Yet just as I knew when you

  really died, you know I have brought

  you home. Now you want to be roses.

  My mother’s body

  1.

  The dark socket of the year

  the pit, the cave where the sun lies down

  and threatens never to rise,

  when despair descends softly as the snow

  covering all paths and choking roads:

  then hawk-faced pain seized you

  threw you so you fell with a sharp

  cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.

  My father heard the crash but paid

  no mind, napping after lunch,

  yet fifteen hundred miles north

  I heard and dropped a dish.

  Your pain sunk talons in my skull

  and crouched there cawing, heavy

  as a great vessel filled with water,

  oil or blood, till suddenly next day

  the weight lifted and I knew your mind

  had guttered out like the Chanukah

  candles that burn so fast, weeping

  veils of wax down the chanukiyot.

  Those candles were laid out,

  friends invited, ingredients bought

  for latkes and apple pancakes,

  that holiday for liberation

  and the winter solstice

  when tops turn like little planets.

  Shall you have all or nothing

  take half or pass by untouched?

  Nothing you got, Nun said the dreidl

  as the room stopped spinning.

  The angel folded you up like laundry

  your body thin as an empty dress.

  Your clothes were curtains

  hanging on the window of what had

  been your flesh and now was glass.

  Outside in Florida shopping plazas

  loudspeakers blared Christmas carols

  and palm trees were decked with blinking

  lights. Except by the tourist

  hotels, the beaches were empty.

  Pelicans with pregnant pouches

  flapped overhead like pterodactyls.

  In my mind I felt you die.

  First the pain lifted and then

  you flickered and went out.

  2.

  I walk through the rooms of memory.

  Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,

  every chair ghostly and muted.

  Other times memory lights up from within

  bustling scenes acted just the other side

  of a scrim through which surely I could reach

  my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain

  of time which is and isn’t and will be

  the stuff of which we’re made and unmade.

  In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen,

  your first nasty marriage just annulled,

  thin from your abortion, clutching a book

  against your cheek and trying to look

  older, trying to look middle class,

  trying for a job at Wanamaker’s,

  dressing for parties in cast-off

  stage costumes of your sisters’. Your eyes

&nb
sp; were hazy with dreams. You did not

  notice me waving as you wandered

  past and I saw your slip was showing.

  You stood still while I fixed your clothes,

  as if I were your mother. Remember me

  combing your springy black hair, ringlets

  that seemed metallic, glittering;

  remember me dressing you, my seventy-year-

  old mother who was my last doll baby,

  giving you too late what your youth had wanted.

  3.

  What is this mask of skin we wear,

  what is this dress of flesh,

  this coat of few colors and little hair?

  This voluptuous seething heap of desires

  and fears, squeaking mice turned up

  in a steaming haystack with their babies?

  This coat has been handed down, an heirloom,

  this coat of black hair and ample flesh,

  this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.

  This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks,

  they provided cushioning for my grandmother

  Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me

  and we all sat on them in turn, those major

  muscles on which we walk and walk and walk

  over the earth in search of peace and plenty.

  My mother is my mirror and I am hers.

  What do we see? Our face grown young again,

  our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.

  Our arms quivering with fat, eyes

  set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,

  our belly seamed with childbearing.

  Give me your dress so I can try it on.

  Oh it will not fit you, Mother, you are too fat.

  I will not fit you, Mother.

  I will not be the bride you can dress,

  the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,

  a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth.

  You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.

  Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks

  barbed and drawing blood with their caress.

  My twin, my sister, my lost love,

  I carry you in me like an embryo

  as once you carried me.

  4.

  What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?