My Mother's Body Read online

  I depend, those few for whom

  I will rise in the night to give

  comfort, massage, medicine,

  whose calls I always take.

  My children are my books

  that I gestate for years,

  a slow-witted elephant

  eternally pregnant, books

  that I sit on for eras like the great

  auk on a vast marble egg.

  I raise them with loving care,

  I groom and educate them,

  I chastise, reward and adore.

  I exercise them lean and fatten them up.

  I roll them about my mind all night

  and fuss over them in the mornings.

  Then they march off into the world

  to be misunderstood, mistreated, stolen,

  to be loved for the wrong reasons,

  to be fondled, beaten, lost.

  Now and then I get a postcard

  from Topeka Kansas, doing just fine.

  People take them in and devour them.

  People marry them for love.

  People write me letters and tell me

  how they are my children too.

  I have children whose languages

  rattle dumbly in my ears like gravel,

  children born of the wind that blows

  through me from the graves of the poor

  and brave who struggled all their short

  throttled lives to free people

  whose faces they could not imagine.

  Such are the children of my words.

  Mr. Big

  Darkest chocolate, bittersweet,

  the muscled power of horse’s

  haunches, the sleekness of a seal,

  the swagger of a heavyweight

  strolling to the ring:

  Jim Beam works hard as overlord

  hustling to rule his turf in winter

  when only the great horned owl

  can frighten him. But July Fourth

  brings up the summer people

  with their dogs, their cats,

  their children, their dirt bikes,

  their firecrackers. All summer

  he collects scars and anger

  trying to boss his ward.

  He gets leaner, meaner.

  He sulks and roars in baritone

  O my unappreciated soul, all night.

  He wants to be force-fed

  love like chicken soup.

  He wants love to chase him

  like a panting dog,

  without asking, without earning.

  Jim Beam, you’re indistinguishable

  from half the men I’ve adored.

  Being a cat you are lucky.

  I do carry you off by force

  and today you lie by the computer

  on a satin pillow and eat turkey

  and suffer, suffer your belly

  to be scratched and endure

  your chin chucked and tickled, at ease,

  air conditioned while it’s ninety out.

  O Jim Beam, this must

  be love: will you marry me?

  The maternal instinct at work

  In the bed Dinah curls,

  kittens tumbling over kittens

  at nipples pink and upright

  against the silver blue fur.

  Her mrow interrogates.

  The second night she toted

  them one by one into my bed

  arranged them against my flank

  nuzzling, then took off

  flirting her tail.

  Birthing box, bottoms

  of closets, dark places,

  the hell with that. She

  crawled between my legs

  when her water broke.

  Think of them as ours

  she urges us, have you

  heard of any decent day care?

  I think kitten raising

  should be a truly collective

  process, and besides, it’s all

  your fault. You gave me

  to that little silver-

  balled brute to do his will

  upon me. Now look.

  Here I am a hot-water

  bottle, an assembly line

  of tits, a milk factory.

  The least you can do

  is take the night feeding.

  Magic mama

  The woman who shines with a dull comfortable glow.

  The woman who sweats honey, an aphid

  enrolled to sweeten the lives of others.

  The woman who puts down her work like knitting

  the moment you speak, but somehow it gets done

  secretly in the night while everyone sleeps.

  The woman whose lap is wide as the Nile

  delta, whose flesh is a lullaby

  of goosedown petals lacking the bite

  of menace real lullabies ride on

  (if the bough breaks, birds

  and butterflies pecking out his eyes).

  Whose own eyes are soft-focus mirrors.

  Whose arms are bolsters. Whose love

  is laid on like the municipal water.

  She is not the mother goddess, vortex

  of dark and light powers with her consorts,

  her hungers, her favorites, her temper

  blasting the corn so it withers in its ear,

  her bloody humor that sends the hunter fleeing

  to be tracked and torn by his hounds,

  the great door into the earth’s darkness

  where bones are rewoven into wheat,

  who loves the hawk as she loves the rabbit.

  Big mama has no power, not even over herself.

  The taxpayer of guilt, whatever she gives

  you both agree is never enough.

  She is a one-way street down which pour

  parades of opulent gifts and admiration

  from a three-shift factory of love.

  Magic mama has to make it right, straighten

  the crooked, ease pain, raise the darkness,

  feed the hungry and matchmake for the lonesome

  and ask nothing in return. If you win

  you no longer know her, and if you lose

  it is because her goodness failed you.

  Whenever you create big mama from another

  woman’s smile, a generosity of spirit working

  like yeast in the inert matter of the day,

  you are stealing from a woman her own ripe

  grape sweet desire, the must of her fears,

  the shadow she casts into her own future

  and turning her into a diaper service,

  the cleaning lady of your adventure.

  Who thanks a light bulb for giving light?

  Listen, your mother is not your mother.

  She is herself and unmothered. It is time

  to take the apron off your mind.

  Nothing more will happen

  You are rumpled like a sweater

  smelling of burnt leaves and dried sea grasses.

  Your smile belongs to an archaic boy of wasting stone on Delos.

  You change shape like spilled mercury.

  There is no part of you that touches me

  not even your laugh catching like fur in your nose.

  I am with you on a glacier

  white snowfield gouged with blue-green crevasses

  deep and the color of your eyes.

  There is no place to go, we cannot lie down.

  In the distance your people wait checking their gear.

  We blaze like a refinery on the ice.

  A dry snow begins to descend

  as your hands fall clasped to your sides

  as your eyes freeze to the rim of the sky.

  Already I cannot see you for the snow.

  Heavy iron gates like those in a levee or fortress

  are closing in my breasts.

  Blue Tuesday in August

  The world smelled like a mattress you find


  on the street and leave there,

  or like a humid house reciting yesterday’s

  dinner menu and the day before’s.

  Everybody had breathed this air repeatedly

  and used it to cool an engine.

  Oil hung in the sky in queasy clouds.

  Then the rain swept through slamming doors.

  Today is blue as a cornflower,

  tall as a steel tower,

  springy as a trampoline.

  Beside the drive the ruffs of Queen Anne’s lace

  are host to the striped caterpillar

  that probes with its roan horns.

  Dry as the white dunes under sunlight, the day

  smells of cut curing grasses beige as Siamese cats.

  The cicadas like little chainsaws inflame the air.

  All things bear sharp corners of a pane of glass.

  What a clean unused day to walk all over.

  On such a morning I can almost believe

  something blue and green and yellow

  may survive us after we explode

  and burn the sky down.

  Some shoot may sprout and grow.

  The Disinherited

  We do not inherit the world from our parents,

  we borrow it from our children.

  Gandhi

  The dreams of the children

  reek of char and ashes.

  The fears of the children

  peer out through the brown eyes

  of a calf tethered away from its mother,

  a calf who bawls for the unknown

  bad thing about to happen

  as the butcher’s truck arrives.

  The children finger their own sharp

  bones in their wrists.

  They knead their foreheads gingerly.

  Last night I dreamed Mother was burning,

  the little girl said in class,

  my father, my dog, my brother,

  fire was eating them all.

  I wrote three postcards to the President.

  I won’t be anything when I grow up,

  the boy said, I won’t live that long.

  I don’t like firecrackers anymore.

  I always draw houses falling.

  Blood seeps from the roof of the cave

  of their minds, fear becoming rock.

  In their dreams there is one great

  loud noise. Then weeping. Then silence.

  Cold head, cold heart

  I suppose no one has ever died of a head cold

  while not fearing or fervently

  wishing to do so on the hour,

  gasping through a nose the size of Detroit.

  My mouth tastes of moldy sneaker.

  My tongue is big as a liverwurst.

  My throat steams like a sewer.

  The gnome of snot has stuck a bicycle pump in my ear.

  I am a quagmire, a slithy bog.

  I exude effluvia, mumbled curses,

  and a dropsy of wads of paper,

  handkerchiefs like little leprosies.

  The world is an irritant

  full of friends jumping in noisy frolic.

  The damned healthy: I breathe on them.

  My germs are my only comfort.

  Deferral

  You’ll do it, what you really want.

  You’ll start counting, you’ll

  feel everything direct as rain

  on your skin in mild May twilight.

  You’ll start chewing every moment

  like fresh corn on the cob hot

  buttered and actually enjoy it

  as soon as you grow up, leave home,

  after you’ve got your diploma,

  when you’ve passed your orals,

  when you finish psychoanalysis,

  as soon as you meet the one woman for you,

  when Mr. Right comes charging along,

  after you pay off the mortgage,

  as soon as the children are in school,

  when you finally get the divorce,

  after the children finish college,

  when you’re promoted as you deserve,

  when you’re a complete success at last,

  after you retire to Florida,

  when you die and go to heaven.

  You’ll have considerable practice

  at being dead by then.

  Breaking out

  My first political act? I am seeing

  two doors that usually stood open,

  leaning together like gossips, making

  a closet of their corner.

  A mangle stood there, for ironing

  what I never thought needed it:

  sheets, towels, my father’s underwear;

  an upright vacuum with its stuffed

  sausage bag that deflated with a gusty

  sigh as if weary of housework as I,

  who swore I would never dust or sweep

  after I left home, who hated

  to see my mother removing daily

  the sludge the air lay down like a snail’s track

  so that when in school I read of Sisyphus

  and his rock, it was her I

  thought of, housewife scrubbing

  on raw knees as the factories rained ash.

  Nasty stork king of the hobnobbing

  doors was a wooden yardstick dusty

  with chalk marks from hems’ rise and fall.

  When I had been judged truly wicked

  that stick was the tool of punishment.

  I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive

  as if noise could ward off blows.

  My mother wielded it more fiercely

  but my father far longer and harder.

  I’d twist my head in the mirror to inspect.

  I’d study those red and blue mountain

  ranges as on a map that offered escape,

  the veins and arteries the roads

  I could travel to freedom when I grew.

  When I was eleven, after a beating

  I took and smashed the ruler to kindling.

  Fingering the splinters I could not believe.

  How could this rod prove weaker than me?

  It was not that I was never again beaten

  but in destroying that stick that had measured my pain

  the next day I was an adolescent, not a child.

  This is not a tale of innocence lost but power

  gained: I would not be Sisyphus.

  There were things that I should learn to break.

  Paper birds

  Paper birds:

  can they fly?

  Not far.

  Can they dive after fish?

  Do they lay edible eggs?

  Do they eat harmful insects?

  No, but they sing

  both long and short

  and scratch real fleas.

  Can you cook them?

  How do they taste?

  Like you. Like me.

  They fill the mind

  but half an hour later

  you want more.

  How many kinds are there?

  They evolve, like other

  birds, fill empty niches,

  become extinct.

  But each species

  is composed of only one.

  How do they reproduce then?

  By fission. By fusion.

  By one hell of a lot of work.

  Listening to a speech

  The woman carefully dressed

  in quasimale drag

  fashionable among her friends

  spoke scornfully from the podium

  of bourgeois housewives.

  Bourgeois? Someone who works

  for nothing

  who owns zip,

  who receives no pension,

  who possesses no credit, no name.

  I thought the bourgeoisie

  owned the means of production?

  She is a means of reproduction

&nbs
p; leased by her husband,

  liable to be traded in.

  Those widows who live on cat food,

  those ladies who eat in cafeterias

  once a day, taking fifteen

  minutes to choose their only dish,

  their houses have deserted them.

  This bag lady chewing stale hot-

  dog buns from the garbage igloo,

  who pees in the alley squatting,

  who sleeps in an abandoned car,

  was a bourgeois housewife.

  Your superiority licks itself

  like a pleased cat. No housewife

  is bourgeois any more than pets

  are, just one owner away

  from the streets and starvation.

  Making a will

  Over the shoulder peer cartoon images

  of skinny misers and bloated bankers

  disinheriting wayward daughters in love

  with honest workingclass boys;

  the dowager in her bed writing in

  the gardener, writing out her nephew.

  Little goes the way we plan it

  even with us to knead and pull,

  stir and sweeten and cook it down.

  How many scenes written flat on the back

  in bed ever play in the moonlight?

  How often revenge bubbles itself flat.

  Given wobbly control with all our

  muscle and guile and wit bearing down

  like a squad of tactical police,

  how do we suppose when we’re ashes

  what we think we want will matter?

  Less than the spider in the rafters.

  We cannot protect those we love

  no matter how we gild and dip them

  in the molten plastic of our care;

  when we are gone our formulae

  in legal sludge guarantee nothing

  but that all lawyer’s fees be paid.

  Maybe it is an act of faith

  not in anything but the goodwill

  of a few, those documents of intent

  we scatter in which we claim sound mind

  and try to stuff a log in the jaws

  of fate to keep those teeth from closing.