My Mother's Body Page 4

  to roll on the clean carpets.

  By the next day it looks like

  a rummage sale at five o’clock.

  House-keeping

  This box of house, like a child’s

  treasure trove of colored stones, blue jay

  and pheasant feathers, random playing cards,

  is irrational in the pleasure it proffers

  those who fill it slowly

  with the detritus and the clothing

  of their living. It is the burrow

  of a sand worm decorated with pebble

  and shell the tides bring in.

  This house is part toy: we move lamps

  and chairs about exactly as I did

  in my dollhouse, where I first played

  at creation and fashioned dramas,

  gave names to china animals, like Adam;

  and like a god, invented rules.

  This house is part clothing, a warm

  coat that keeps us snug from the cold,

  a huge raincoat that covers us dry.

  It is our facade to friend and stranger,

  stuck over with emblems of our taste,

  our friends, our flush times, our travels,

  our previous misadventures.

  This house displays our virtue to each other.

  I swept the kitchen floor twice this week.

  But I took the trash to the dump Tuesday.

  I am putting up shelves, so kiss me.

  See how the freshly polished table shines

  like a red, red apple with love.

  This house is a nest in which the eggs

  of worries hatch fledglings

  of cowbird’s young who usurp the care

  and push the right nestlings out.

  This house eats money and shits bills.

  Bed, table, desk: here is the hearth of love.

  I am territorial as my cats. When I return

  I stroll the house singing arias of the familiar.

  I leave here on a long tether that pulls

  hard in the day and harder at night.

  Return of the prodigal darling

  At two a rabbit screamed.

  A splash of blood on the floodlit needles.

  The mice of the ashy dawn

  nibbled my salted eyelashes.

  Outside, the rough gears of the world

  clanked on, bodies smashed

  on every spoke and sprocket

  oiling those grim wheels.

  I dreamed your step, your warmth

  against my side and woke to see

  the weird grey stars of terror

  wheeling around the pole of midnight.

  The tears I spouted sleepless nights,

  they are spangled on the grasses

  among the small webs like flimsy tents,

  now traps and prisms of the sun.

  I am entire, grafted together,

  satiated with you and shining

  inside and outside, a hot orange,

  liquid all through with joy.

  Let me web and petal you with kisses,

  let me deck you with love baubles

  like a rich Christmas tree, hung

  with totems and birds and lights.

  My love is peeled to its prickly

  bleeding quick. I want to lick you over

  like a mother cat. Each hair of your

  head is numbered in my love.

  Down

  Come let us raise our tent of skin.

  Let me wrap you in the night of my hair

  so our legs climb each other like pea vines.

  The tiger lily is open on the freckled hour.

  Bite into its ruddiness, a peach

  splitting with ripeness and juice.

  I stood in the sugar cane

  near Cienfuegos and bit on the green

  fibrous stem and the sweetness flowed.

  We plunge into each other as into a pool

  that closes over our heads. We float

  suspended in liquid velvet.

  The light comes from behind the eyes,

  red, soft, thick as blood, ancient as sleep.

  We build each other with our hands.

  That is where flesh is translucent as water.

  That is where flesh shines with its own light.

  That is where flesh ripples as you walk

  through it like fog and it closes around you.

  That is where boundaries fail and wink out.

  Flesh dreams down to rock and up to fire.

  Here ego dissolves, a slug in vinegar,

  although its loud demands will come back

  like a bounced check as soon as we rise.

  But this dim red place that waits at the pit

  of the pool is real as the bone in the flesh

  and there we make love as you make a table

  where the blood roars like an ocean in the ears

  remembering its source, and we remember

  how we are bound and body of each other.

  House built of breath

  Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.

  Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.

  Wet as onions, dry as salt.

  Slow as honey, fast as seltzer,

  my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love

  my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple

  I love you daily as milk,

  I love you nightly as aromatic port.

  The words trail a bitter slime like slugs,

  then in the belly warm like cabbage borscht.

  The words are hung out on the line,

  sheets for the wind to bleach.

  The words are simmering slowly

  on the back burner like a good stew.

  Words are the kindling in the wood stove.

  Even the quilt at night is stuffed with word down.

  When we are alone the walls sing

  and even the cats talk but only in Yiddish.

  When we are alone we make love in deeds.

  And then in words. And then in food.

  The infidelity of sleep

  We tie our bodies in a lover’s

  knot and then gradually uncoil.

  We turn and talk, the night lapping

  at the sills of the casements, rising

  in us like dark heavy wine.

  Then we turn aside. Eskimo

  crawling into private igloos,

  bears retreating to distant lairs,

  a leopard climbing its home tree,

  we go unmated into sleep.

  In sleep you fret about who a lover

  untouched for years is sleeping with.

  Some man with a face glimpsed once

  in a crowd lies over me sweating.

  Now I wear male flesh like a suit of armor.

  In sleep I am speaking French again.

  The Algerian War is still on.

  I curse, back to the wall of the top

  floor of a workers’-quarter house.

  The war in Vietnam is still on.

  I am carrying a memorized message

  to a deserter who is hiding

  in a church belfry. All night

  I drive fast down back roads

  with a borrowed car full of contraband.

  In the morning, of what we remember,

  what can we tell? In the mind

  dreams flash their facets, but in words

  they dim, brilliant rocks picked up

  at low tide that dry to mud.

  Nightly the tides of sleep enter

  us in secret claret-red oceans

  from whose deep slide serpents

  wearing faces radiant and impure

  as saints in Renaissance paintings.

  Now as night pours in to fill the house

  like a conch shell, we cling together,

  muttered words between us, a spar

  we hold to knowing that soon

  we will let go, severed, to drown.


  Nailing up the mezuzah

  A friend from Greece

  brought a tin house

  on a plaque, designed

  to protect our abode,

  as in Greek churches

  embossed legs or hearts

  on display entreat aid.

  I hung it but now

  nail my own proper charm.

  I refuse no offers of help,

  at least from friends,

  yet this presence

  is long overdue. Mostly

  we nurture our own

  blessings or spoil them,

  build firmly or undermine

  our walls. Who are termites

  but our obsessions gnawing?

  Still the winds blow hard

  from the cave of the sea

  carrying off what they will.

  Our smaller luck abides

  like a worm snug in an apple

  who does not comprehend

  the shivering of the leaves

  as the ax bites hard

  in the smooth trunk.

  We need all help proffered

  by benign forces. Outside

  we commit our beans to the earth,

  the tomato plants started

  in February to the care

  of the rain. My little

  pregnant grey cat offers

  the taut bow of her belly

  to the sun’s hot tongue.

  Saturday I watched alewives

  swarm in their thousands

  waiting in queues quivering

  pointed against the white

  rush of the torrents

  to try their leaps upstream.

  The gulls bald as coffin

  nails stabbed them casually

  conversing in shrieks, picnicking.

  On its earth, this house

  is oriented. We grow

  from our bed rooted firmly

  as an old willow into the water

  of our dreams flowing deep

  in the hillside. This hill

  is my temple, my soul.

  Malach hamoves, angel of death

  pass over, pass on.

  CHIAROSCURO

  The good go down

  I build stories. They own

  their own shapes, their rightful

  power and impetus, plot

  them however I try, but always

  that shape is broadly just.

  I want to believe in justice

  inexorable as the decay

  of an isotope; I want to plot

  the orbit of justice, erratic

  but inevitable as a comet’s return.

  It is not blind chance I rail at,

  the flood waters that carry off

  one house and leave its neighbor

  standing one foot above the high

  water’s swirling grasp.

  It is that the good go down

  not easily, not gently,

  not occasionally, not by random

  deviation and the topple

  of mischance, but almost always.

  Here is something new and true.

  No, you are too different,

  too raw, too spiced and gritty.

  We want one like the last one.

  We know how to sell that.

  We want one that praises us,

  we want one that puts down

  the ones we squat on, no

  aftertaste, no residue of fine

  thought smeared on the eyes.

  We want one just like all

  the others, but with a designer

  label and a clever logo.

  We want one we saw advertised

  in The New York Times.

  Are the controls working?

  Is the doorman on duty?

  Is the intercom connected?

  Is the monitor functioning?

  Is the incinerator on?

  It goes without saying:

  The brie shall be perfectly

  ripe, the wine shall be a second

  cru Bordeaux from a decent year,

  there shall be one guest

  with a recent certified success

  and we shall pass around plates

  of grated contempt for those

  who lack this much, of sugared

  envy for those who have more.

  For the young not facile enough

  to imitate the powerful, not skilled

  enough liars to pretend sucking them

  is ecstasy, they erect a massive

  wall, the Himalayas of exclusion.

  For the old who speak too much

  of pain, they have a special

  Greenland of exile. Old Birnbaum.

  Nobody reads her anymore.

  I thought she was dead.

  Once she is, and her cat

  starves, she will become a growth

  industry. Only kill yourself

  and you can be consumed too,

  an incense-proffered icon.

  It is the slow mean defeat

  of the good that I rail against,

  the small pallid contempt of the well

  placed for those who do not lack

  the imaginative power to try,

  the good who are warped by passion

  as granite is twisted into mountains

  and metamorphosed by fire into marble;

  who speak too loud in vulgar tongues

  because they have something to say;

  who mean what they make down to their

  bones; who commit the uncouth error

  of feeling, of saying what they feel,

  of making others feel. Their reward

  is to be made to feel worthless.

  Goodness is not dangerous enough.

  I want goodness like a Nike armed

  with the warhead of rightful anger.

  I want goodness that can live on sand

  and stones and wring wine from burrs,

  goodness that can put forth fruit,

  manured with the sewage of hatred.

  The good must cultivate their anger

  like fields of wheat that must feed

  them, if they are ever to win.

  Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein

  We all wanted to go to you.

  Even women who had not heard

  of you, longed for you, our

  cool grey mother who would

  gently, carefully and slowly, using

  no nurse but ministering herself,

  open our thighs and our vaginas

  and show us the os smiling

  in the mirror like a full rising moon.

  You taught us our health, our sickness

  and our regimes, presiding over

  the raw ends of life, a priestess eager

  to initiate. Never did you tell us

  we could not understand what you

  understood. You made our bodies

  glow transparent. You did not think

  you had a license to question us

  about our married state or lovers’ sex.

  Your language was as gentle and caring

  as your hands. On the mantel

  in the waiting room the clippings hung,

  old battles, victories, marches.

  You with your flower face, strong

  in your thirties in the thirties,

  were carted to prison for the crime

  of prescribing birth control

  for workingclass women in Lynn.

  The quality of light in those quiet

  rooms where we took our shoes off

  before entering and the little

  dog accompanied you like a familiar,

  was respect: respect for life,

  respect for women, respect for choice,

  a mutual respect I cannot imagine

  I shall feel for any other doctor,

  bordering on love.

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

  Here I am I think in Des Moines,

  in Dubuque, in Moscow Idaho, in a cube of motel room

  but where is my wandering luggage tonight?

  Where is my bathrobe slippery as wet rock,

  green as St. Patrick’s Day icing?

  Are my black boots keeled over under another bed?

  Do my tampons streak across the night

  little white rockets trailing contrails of string?

  Are women in Alaska dicing for my red shoes?

  Did TWA banish my suitcase to Siberia?

  Where is that purple dress in which my voice

  is twice as loud, with the gold belt

  glittering like the money I hope to get paid,

  sympathetic magic to lure checks

  out of comptrollers before time molders?

  I feel like an impostor, a female impersonator,

  a talking laundry bag dialing head calls

  to all my clothes in Port Huron, in Biloxi, in Tucson,

  collect calls into the night: I’m lonely and dirty.

  I’m sorry I spilled chili on you, chocolate sauce,

  Elmer’s Glue. I’ll wear an apron at all times.

  I’ll never again eat tacos. O my wandering clothes,

  fly through the night to me, homing pigeons

  trailing draperies like baroque saints, come home.

  Your cats are your children

  Certain friends come in, they say

  Your cats are your children.

  They smile from a great height on down.

  Clouds roll in around their hair.

  I have real children, they mean,

  while you have imitation.

  My cats are not my children.

  I gave Morgaine away yesterday

  to a little boy she liked.

  I’m not saving to send them to Harvard.

  When they stay out overnight

  I don’t call the police.

  I like the way they don’t talk,

  the way they do, eyes shining

  or narrowed, tails bannering,

  paws kneading, cats with private

  lives and passions sharp as their claws,

  hunters, lovers, great sulkers.

  No, my children are my friends,

  my lover, my dependents on whom