My Mother's Body Read online

  Did I truly think you could put me back inside?

  Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten

  furnace and be recast, that I would become you?

  What did you fear in me, the child who wore

  your hair, the woman who let that black hair

  grow long as a banner of darkness, when you

  a proper flapper wore yours cropped?

  You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery

  flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.

  Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.

  Secretly the bones formed in the bread.

  I became willful, private as a cat.

  You never knew what alleys I had wandered.

  You called me bad and I posed like a gutter

  queen in a dress sewn of knives.

  All I feared was being stuck in a box

  with a lid. A good woman appeared to me

  indistinguishable from a dead one

  except that she worked all the time.

  Your payday never came. Your dreams ran

  with bright colors like Mexican cottons

  that bled onto the drab sheets of the day

  and would not bleach with scrubbing.

  My dear, what you said was one thing

  but what you sang was another, sweetly

  subversive and dark as blackberries,

  and I became the daughter of your dream.

  This body is your body, ashes now

  and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,

  my throat, my thighs. You run in me

  a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,

  you sing in my mind like wine. What you

  did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

  THE CHUPPAH

  Dedicated to Rabbi Debra Hachen,

  who made a beautiful wedding with us,

  for which many of the poems in this section were written.

  Two poems by Ira Wood are included.

  Witnessing a wedding

  Slowly and slower you have learned

  to let yourselves grow while weaving

  through each other in strong cloth.

  It is not strangeness in the mate

  you must fear, and not the fear

  that loosens us so we lean back

  chilly with a sudden draft on flesh

  recently joined and taste again

  the other sharp as tin in the mouth,

  but familiarity we must mistrust,

  the word based on the family

  that fogs the sight and plugs the nose.

  Fills the ears with the wax of possession.

  Toughens the daily dead skin

  callused against penetration.

  Never think you know finally, or say

  My husband likes, My wife is,

  without balancing in the coil of the inner ear

  that no one is surely anything till dead.

  Love without respect is cold as a boa

  constrictor, its caresses as choking.

  Celebrate your differences in bed.

  Like species, couples die out or evolve.

  Ah strange new beasties with strawberry hides,

  velvet green antlers, undulant necks,

  tentacles, wings and the senses of bees,

  your own changing mosaic of face

  and the face of the stranger you live with

  and try to love, who enters your body

  like water, like pain, like food.

  Touch tones

  We learn each other in braille,

  what the tongue and teeth taste,

  what the fingers trace, translate

  into arias of knowledge and delight

  of silk and stubble, of bark

  and velvet and wet roses,

  warbling colors that splash through

  bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,

  the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor

  of resin, the voice that later

  comes unbidden as a Mozart horn

  concerto circling in the ears.

  You are translated from label,

  politic mask, accomplished patter,

  to the hands round hefting,

  to a weight, a thrust, a scent

  sharp as walking in early

  morning a path through a meadow

  where a fox has been last night

  and something in the genes saying

  FOX to that rich ruddy smell.

  The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth

  can speak a name in runes. Absent,

  your presence carols in the blood.

  The place where everything changed

  Great love is an abrupt switching

  in a life bearing along at express speeds

  expecting to reach the designated stations

  at the minute listed in the timetable.

  Great love can cause derailment,

  coaches upended, people screaming,

  luggage strewn over the mountainside,

  blood and paper on the grass.

  It’s months before the repairs are done,

  everyone discharged from the hospital,

  all the lawsuits settled, damage

  paid for, the scandal subsided.

  Then we get on with the journey

  in some new direction, hiking overland

  with camels, mules, via helicopter

  by barge through canals.

  The maps are all redrawn and what

  was north is east of south

  and there be dragons in those mountains

  and the sun shines warmer and hairier

  and the moon has a cat’s face.

  There is more sunshine. More rain.

  The seasons are marked and intense.

  We seldom catch colds.

  There is always you at my back

  ready to fight when I must fight;

  there is always you at my side

  the words flashing light and shadow.

  What was grey ripples scarlet and golden;

  what was bland reeks of ginger and brandy;

  what was empty roars like a packed stadium;

  what slept gallops for miles.

  Even our bones are reformed in the close

  night when we hold each other’s dreams.

  Memories uncoil backward and are remade.

  Now the first egg itself is freshly twinned.

  We build daily houses brick by brick.

  We put each other up at night like tents.

  This story tells itself as it grows.

  Each morning we give birth to one another.

  What Makes It Good?

  What makes it good

  Is that we came to this

  Having each tasted freely

  Of the sweet plum flesh of others.

  So your head will not turn?

  It may turn.

  But my feet won’t follow.

  What makes it good

  Is that we came to this slowly

  Not blind or in white fever

  Tearing off our clothes running

  But walking arm around shoulder

  Friends.

  So you will not fight?

  We will fight

  Fists balled, throats

  Full to choking

  But we have learned

  How to stop

  Before the blade hits the throat.

  What makes it good

  Is that we give each other

  Freedom, for the laughter

  Of others.

  So you’ve never had to give up friends?

  I have given up

  My gang of boys.

  They wanted me to trade

  Her for them

  But why trade

  When you have what you want?

  What makes it good

  Is that neither dawdles thinking

  My lover kept me back.

  So you are not ambitiou
s?

  I am ambitious.

  And what will you do about her?

  Take her with me.

  And if you go nowhere?

  It is no fault of hers.

  What makes it good

  Is that we

  Both

  Want it bad,

  To be good.

  Ira Wood

  Why marry at all?

  Why mar what has grown up between the cracks

  and flourished, like a weed

  that discovers itself to bear rugged

  spikes of magenta blossom in August,

  ironweed sturdy and bold,

  a perennial that endures winters to persist?

  Why register with the State?

  Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?

  Why risk the whole apparatus of roles

  and rules, of laws and liabilities?

  Why license our bed at the foot

  like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

  Why encumber our love with patriarchal

  word stones, with the old armor

  of husband and the corset stays

  and the chains of wife? Marriage

  meant buying a breeding womb

  and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

  Marriage has built boxes in which women

  have burst their hearts sooner

  than those walls; boxes of private

  slow murder and the fading of the bloom

  in the blood; boxes in which secret

  bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

  But we cannot invent a language

  of new grunts. We start where we find

  ourselves, at this time and place

  which is always the crossing of roads

  that began beyond the earth’s curve

  but whose destination we can now alter.

  This is a public saying to all our friends

  that we want to stay together. We want

  to share our lives. We mean to pledge

  ourselves through times of broken stone

  and seasons of rose and ripe plum;

  we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

  We Come Together

  We come together

  Pure and ample

  Top-heavy woman

  Stocky man

  Midwestern half-breed

  Long Island Jew.

  Jew with eyes of jade

  Jew with eyes of almonds

  Jews with tempers

  Like the blue serpent tongue

  Of the lightning that cracks

  The sky over our land.

  We come together strong

  Strong as our passion to lie

  Skin pressed to skin, quivering.

  Strong as our hunger

  To tell, to taste, to know.

  I am lucky to have you

  I know it.

  But with each windfall

  Comes the tax

  With each rainfall

  The weeds

  To kneel and pull.

  We give and take

  With no line between.

  We grow our food.

  We heal our wounds.

  You remind me

  Good writing takes time,

  I bolster you

  When the world attacks.

  We came together

  Each an other,

  Sister brother

  Mother son

  Father daughter

  Man and woman.

  We lick each other’s skins like lost kittens.

  Fight like starving strays.

  We talk deep into the night

  Make each other coffee

  Keep each other straight.

  We are scrub oak

  Strong and low

  Peony

  Full bodied, brilliant

  Feast for the butterfly

  Feast for the ant.

  Our love is like the land.

  We work to keep it fertile.

  Ira Wood

  Every leaf is a mouth

  The way the grain of you runs

  wavy and strong as maple.

  Black grapes warm in the hand,

  the bloom on them like mist,

  breathe their scent in gusts:

  dusk of a summer evening.

  In sleep you shimmer heat

  banked like a Russian stove.

  How wide you open to me,

  a volcano gaping its belly

  of fire all the way to the molten

  core; a tree whose every leaf

  is a mouth drinking sunshine

  whose roots are all mouths.

  Our life is a daily fugue

  polyphonic, with odd harmonies

  that make the bones vibrate

  secretly, sweetly in the flesh

  the way a divining rod shivers

  over veins of water, or power.

  The Wine

  Red is the body’s own deep song,

  the color of lips, of our busy

  organs, heart and stomach and lungs,

  the color of our roused genitals,

  the color of tongues and the flag of our blood.

  Red is the loudest color

  and the most secret

  lurking inside the clothes’ cocoon,

  banked in the dark of the nightly bed

  like coals shimmering in a stove.

  It is the hot color, the active

  that dances into your eye leaping,

  that goads and pricks you

  with its thorn of fire,

  that shouts and urges and commands.

  But red coils in the wineglass

  head into tail like a dozing cat

  whose eyes have shut but who purrs still

  the pleasure of your hand, whose

  warmth gently loosens the wine’s aroma

  so it rises like a perfumed ghost

  inside the chambers of your nose.

  In the mouth wine opens

  its hundred petals like a damask rose

  and then subsides, swallowed to afterglow.

  In the wine press of the bed

  of all the salty flows of our bodies,

  the heat of our love ferments

  our roundness into the midnight red

  flowering of the wine

  that can make drunken and make warm

  that can comfort and quicken the sluggish

  that can ease the weary body into sleep

  that can frame the dark bread and cheese

  into feast, that can celebrate

  and sing through the wine of the body,

  its own bright blood that rushes

  to every cranny and cove of the flesh

  and dark of the bone, the joy in love

  that is the wine of life.

  The Chuppah

  The chuppah stands on four poles.

  The home has its four corners.

  The chuppah stands on four poles.

  The marriage stands on four legs.

  Four points loose the winds

  that blow on the walls of the house,

  the south wind that brings the warm rain,

  the east wind that brings the cold rain,

  the north wind that brings the cold sun

  and the snow, the long west wind

  bringing the weather off the far plains.

  Here we live open to the seasons.

  Here the winds caress and cuff us

  contrary and fierce as bears.

  Here the winds are caught and snarling

  in the pines, a cat in a net clawing

  breaking twigs to fight loose.

  Here the winds brush your face

  soft in the morning as feathers

  that float down from a dove’s breast.

  Here the moon sails up out of the ocean

  dripping like a just washed apple.

  Here the sun wakes us like a baby.

 
Therefore the chuppah has no sides.

  It is not a box.

  It is not a coffin.

  It is not a dead end.

  Therefore the chuppah has no walls

  We have made a home together

  open to the weather of our time.

  We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle

  converting fierce energy into bread.

  The canopy is the cloth of our table

  where we share fruit and vegetables

  of our labor, where our care for the earth

  comes back and we take its body in ours.

  The canopy is the cover of our bed

  where our bodies open their portals wide,

  where we eat and drink the blood

  of our love, where the skin shines red

  as a swallowed sunrise and we burn

  in one furnace of joy molten as steel

  and the dream is flesh and flower.

  O my love O my love we dance

  under the chuppah standing over us

  like an animal on its four legs,

  like a table on which we set our love

  as a feast, like a tent

  under which we work

  not safe but no longer solitary

  in the searing heat of our time.

  How we make nice

  Before we clean, we scream

  accusatory, rowdy as gulls.

  We screech, we bark, we flap.

  Abruptly we subside and start.

  Always it is two weeks past

  the last endurable point.

  It is destiny we grovel to,

  that if we do not clean

  we will smother in our own dirt.

  We mutter and swot and heave.

  We scrub and spray and haul out.

  The vacuum cleaner chokes on a tissue

  ball, its bag exploding; some cat

  vomited behind the heaviest couch.

  Dusted cobwebs fall on the scrubbed counter.

  O house, neat as a stamp collection,

  everything in its place ordained

  glimmering with propriety at last.

  Invite all our friends to dinner,

  summon the neighbors who call

  this the jungle. Let in the cats