My Mother's Body Read online

  Our will dies with us indeed, although

  consequences resonate through the stars

  with old television dramas,

  undergoing a red shift we will never

  comprehend as distance bends our acts,

  our words, our memories, to alien

  configurations fading into lives

  of creatures strange to us as jellyfish

  in a future we have hewn, bled,

  bounded and escaped from. What

  we have truly bequeathed is what

  we have done or neglected, to that end.

  Still life

  We have glass eyes and rubber fingers.

  Our minds are industrial dumps,

  full of chemical residues, reruns,

  jeans commercials and the asses

  of people we have never touched.

  The camera sees for us.

  Our pets act out our emotions.

  Quiet has to be waited into.

  Can I learn to coil, a snake

  on a warm flat rock? Can I stand

  eyes and ears open

  hands up like a daisy?

  Can I learn to see what the fox

  contemplates, paws tucked and smiling?

  My bones have forgotten

  how to fall through the moment

  to float leaf-light and land

  like a sheet of paper.

  Will a teacher come

  if I wait in the orange light

  on top of this dune?

  See the sparrow hawk stand in the air

  balancing the keel of her breastbone

  on the surges of wind and warmth:

  till she strikes hard,

  how the pressures sustain her

  exact and teetering

  on blurred wings.

  From HoJo’s to Mr. Softee

  When vittles must keep on a shelf for years

  like newsprint slowly yellowing, when food

  can’t be bitter or spicy or hot or sour,

  then people drink sweet pop, gobble sweet cupcakes

  under icings and pour sugar on presweetened

  breakfast crunchies and eat iceberg lettuce

  with thick orange corn-syrup dressing, sugar

  in the hamburgers and fish sticks.

  Swelling in our soft mounded flesh, instead

  of ornery people, we want our food to love us.

  The child learns: Love is sugar.

  She grows up sucking, chewing, nibbling

  and is still and always hungry in her cancerous

  cells busy and angry as swarming ants.

  The longings of women

  The longings of women:

  butterflies beating against

  ceilings painted blue like sky;

  flies buzzing and thumping their heads

  against the pane to get out.

  They die and are swept off

  in a feather duster.

  The hopes of women are pinned

  after cyanide by rows

  labeled in Latin

  the fragile wings fading.

  The keeper speaks with melancholy

  of how beautiful they were

  as if he had not killed them.

  The anger of women runs like small

  brown ants you step on,

  swarming in cracks in the pavement,

  marching in long queues

  through the foundation and inside,

  nameless, for our names

  are not yet our own.

  But we are many and hungry

  and our teeth though small are sharp.

  If we move together

  there is no wall we cannot erode

  dust-grain by speck, and the lion

  when he lies down is prey

  to the army of ants.

  Out of sight

  Put away.

  They do that to pets:

  He was suffering. We

  had him put away.

  They do that to women: She wouldn’t

  do the dishes, she heard Saint

  Catherine telling her to prophesy in the street.

  He had her put away.

  Refuse: the garbage, that

  which is refused, which is denied,

  which is discarded.

  The crime of the women in the locked ward

  was asking for help.

  If you beg from the wrong people

  they chop off your hands,

  the old woman said to me.

  My companion made a sign

  with her fingers, but I did

  not think the old lady

  mistaken. Her hands rattled

  like dead leaves from Thorazine.

  She said, I can’t hold a pen

  but it can hold me.

  The powerful make and break laws.

  The weak flee to the bus

  station, their purses stuffed

  with tissues and old letters.

  The weak rush into the closet

  where the dresses smell like Mother,

  into the mirror and through the wall

  into the maze of dreams.

  You are punished for wrong thinking

  by having your brain burnt out

  as the Koran bids you cut off

  the hand of a thief.

  The bodies of the witches were burned

  alive in the millions. What

  barbarity. We burn only brains.

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

  1.

  My old cat lives under a chair.

  Her long fur conceals the sharp

  jut of her fleshless bones.

  Her eyes are dimmed by clouds

  of cataract, only visible

  if you remember their willow green

  as I could judge my mother’s

  by calling up that fierce charred

  brown gaze, smiting, searching.

  When one of the young cats approaches

  she growls in anger harmless

  as distant thunder. They steal her food.

  They do not act from malice.

  They would curl up with her and wash.

  She hisses fear. Her lifelong

  companion died. They appeared.

  Surely the young bear the blame

  for all the changes that menace

  in the fog of grey shapes looming.

  Her senses that like new snow

  had registered the brush strokes

  of tracks, the fall of a pine needle,

  the alighting of a chickadee;

  her senses that had opened

  greedy as the uncurling petals

  of a sea anemone that drinks

  the world’s news from the current;

  that tantalized her with message

  of vole and shrew and rabbit,

  boasting homage her lovers sprayed,

  have failed her like an old

  hanging bridge that decays

  letting her drop through in terror

  to the cold swift river beneath.

  In her ears is her blood rushing.

  The light is trickling away.

  2.

  One day this week my father

  briefly emerged from the burrow

  he bought himself lined with nurses.

  When he gets me on the phone

  he never believes it’s me.

  When I insist, he swells with anger.

  He really wants to phone my mother.

  Often he calls me by her name

  but every time I fail him.

  I am the dead woman in body,

  hips and breasts and thighs,

  elbows and chin and earlobes,

  black black hair as at the age

  she bore me, when he still

  loved her, here she stands,

  but when I open my mouth

  it’s the wrong year and the world

  bristles with women who make short

&
nbsp; hard statements like men and don’t

  apologize enough, who don’t cry

  when he yells or makes a fist.

  He tells me I have stolen his stamps

  down in Florida, the bad utopia

  where he must share a television.

  You took my nail scissors, he shouts

  but means I stole his vigor

  deposited in his checkbook like a giant’s

  external soul. I have his checkbook

  and sign, power of attorney,

  as I pay his doctors, doctors,

  doctors, as I hunch with calculator

  trying to balance accounts. We each

  feel enslaved to the other’s will.

  3.

  Father, I don’t want your little pot

  of nuggets secreted by bad living

  hidden in the mattress of Merrill Lynch

  in an account you haven’t touched

  for twenty years, stocks that soared,

  plummeted, doddering along now

  in their own mad dinosaur race.

  That stock is the doctor that Mother

  couldn’t call when she had the first

  stroke, the dress she didn’t get,

  at eighty-six still scrubbing, cooking,

  toting heavy laundry. The dentist

  I couldn’t go to so I chewed

  aspirin as my teeth broke

  at fifteen when I went out to work,

  all the pleasures, the easing of pain

  you could have bought with both

  your endless hard mutual labor.

  The ghostly dust bowl roared in the mind

  afterward, the desert of want

  where you would surely perish and starve

  if you did not hide away pennies of power,

  make do, make do, hold hard,

  build a fortress of petrified dollars

  stuck together like papier-mâché

  so the tempest of want

  could be shut out to howl at others.

  Dirty little shacks, a rooming-

  house Mother ran for decades,

  a trailer park; after she died

  you bought into Total Life Care,

  a tower of middle-class comfort

  where you could sit down to lunch

  declaring, My broker says.

  But nobody would listen. Only

  Mother had to listen and she is dead.

  You hid alone in your room fighting

  with the cleaning woman who came

  each week but didn’t do it right,

  then finally one midnight wandered out naked

  finally to the world among rustling

  palms demanding someone make you lunch.

  4.

  I wouldn’t sign papers to commit

  you but they found a doctor who would.

  Now you mutter around the ward,

  This was supposed to be fun.

  Do you see your future in the bent

  ones who whimper into their laps,

  who glare at walls through which

  the faces of the absent peer, who hear

  conspiracy mutter in the plumbing?

  I am the bad daughter who could speak

  with my mother’s voice if I wanted,

  because I wear her face, who ought

  to be cooking your meals, who ought

  to be running the vacuum you bought

  her, but instead I pretend

  I am married, pretend to be writing

  books and giving speeches.

  You won’t forgive her ever for dying

  but I heard you call the night nurse

  by her name. You speak of the fog

  you see in the room. Greyness

  is blowing in, the fog that took

  my mother while you slept,

  the fog that shriveled your muscles,

  the fog that thickens between you

  and strangers here where all

  is provided and nothing is wanted.

  The sun blasts on, flat and blatant.

  Everything was built yesterday

  but you. Nobody here remembers

  the strike when you walked the picket line

  joking with sleet freezing your hair,

  how you stood against the flaming wall

  of steel and found the cracked bearing,

  how you alone could make the old turbines

  turn over, how you had the wife

  other men watched when she swayed

  over the grass at the company picnic,

  how you could drink them all witless.

  You’re a shadow swallowed by fog.

  Through your eyes it enters your brain.

  When it lifts you see only pastel

  walls and then your anger standing there

  gleaming like a four-hundred-horsepower car

  you have lost your license to drive.

  UNDERRATED PLEASURES

  Building is taming

  Once a hillside above a marsh,

  a swell of sand and clay sprouting

  pines, white oaks, blueberry bushes.

  A friend who came along to view

  the lot pissed into the bushes.

  A red-shouldered hawk rose

  from a rabbit carcass furious

  sputtering and wet.

  Yet when the builders finished

  the land was undone,

  the house a box gouged into sand,

  the hillside stripped

  washing down into the road below.

  I planted and terraced to hold

  the land. Then this became

  my only graphic artwork,

  painting with greys and greens,

  the four-dimensional sculpture

  of the garden, every two weeks recoloring,

  the angular, the globular,

  the tousled, the spiky, the lush.

  Collage of fragrances, sweet,

  spicy, acrid, subtle, banging.

  Once I watched my female Burmese

  Colette pass along the herb

  garden savoring, rubbing her cheek

  into the funky leaves, but at the anise

  hyssop she sniffed at it and hissed,

  as if its odor spoke to her rudely.

  Cats would have a thousand names for scent.

  Dogwood, honeysuckle, autumn olive

  bore berries and summoned birds

  to stir the air of the hillside,

  to scuttle in the underbrush kicking

  up leaves, to flit through branches.

  Every person who has lived here

  has carved initials on the land:

  that path, that fence, those steps, that shed.

  What draws the eye and hand initially,

  what charms, is after we move in

  changed by us.

  The lover alters

  the beloved by her love,

  even by that hot and tender regard.

  What we make is part the other

  and part us, and what we become

  in our new love is someone

  born from both.

  Cowering in a corner

  A spider nests in the frying pan

  this Wednesday morning; a jumping

  spider stalks prey on the window

  ledge among bottles; little black

  spider is suddenly swimming

  in my wineglass; hairy king

  kong spider swings from the rafters

  to the oil painting; spider

  crouches in my sneaker; spider

  bobbles on the end of an escape

  filament acrobatic over my typewriter

  in front of my nose.

  What do they eat? Not the mice

  in the walls. Not the ants

  busy on their rush-hour freeways

  from the sugar cannister

  and the olive oil spill to the secret

  tunnel world under the sink.

 
Not the sowbugs, wee armadillos

  nibbling the geranium leaves.

  Not the wasps sleeping in paper

  lanterns under the eaves. The other

  nine hundred thousand inhabitants of what

  I foolishly call my house.

  The Listmaker

  I am a compiler of lists: 1 bag

  fine cracked corn, 1 sunflower seeds.

  Thin tomato seedlings in hotbed;

  check dahlias for sprouting.

  Write Kathy. Call Lou. Pay

  oil bill. Decide about Montana.

  I find withered lists in pockets

  of raincoats, reminders to buy birthday

  presents for lovers who wear those warm

  sweaters now in other lives. And what

  did I decide about Montana? To believe

  or disbelieve in its existence?

  To rise at five some morning and fly there?

  A buried assent or denial rots beneath.

  I confess too that sometimes when I am listing

  what I must do on a Monday, I will put on

  tasks already completed for the neat pleasure

  of striking them out, checking them off.

  What do these lists mean? That I mistrust my memory,

  that my attention, a huge hungry crow

  settling to carrion even on the highway

  hates to rise and flap off, wants to continue

  feasting on what it has let down upon

  folding the tent of its broad dusty wings.

  That I like to conquer chaos one square

  at a time like a board game.

  That I fear the sins of omission more

  than commission. That the whining saw

  of the mill of time shrieks always in my ears

  as I am borne with all the other logs

  forward to be dismantled and rebuilt

  into chairs, into frogs, into running water.

  All lists start where they halt, in intention.

  Only the love that is work completes them.

  Going into town in the storm

  The sky is white and the earth is white