My Mother's Body Read online

and the white wind is blowing in arabesques

  through us. The world wizens in the cold

  to a circle that stops beyond my mittens

  outstretched on which the white froth

  still dissolves. Up, north, left—

  all are obliterated in the swirl.

  The only color that exists clings to

  your face, your coat, your scarf.

  We ride the feathered back of a white goose

  that flies miles high over the Himalayas.

  Where yesterday houses stood of neighbors,

  summer people, scandals still smouldering—

  heaps of old tires that burn for days—

  today all is whited out, a mistake

  on a typed page. My blood fizzes in my cheeks

  like a shaken soda waiting to explode.

  Into any haven we reach we will carry

  a dizziness, a blindness that will melt

  slowly, a sense of how uneasily we inhabit

  this earth, how a rise or drop of a few degrees,

  a little more water or a trifle less, renders

  us strange as brontosaurus in our homeland.

  We are fitted for a short winter and then spring.

  We stagger out of the belly of the snow

  plucked of words naked and steaming.

  The clumsy season

  I keep cutting off bits of my fingers or banging

  my knee hard. I am offering pain and blood

  like a down payment on myself withheld.

  Don’t leave me because I am wasting words,

  pissing them out like bad wine swallowed

  that leaves the skull echoing and scraped.

  Don’t let the words rise up and leave me

  like a flight of dissatisfied geese.

  I am waters waiting to be troubled again.

  I am coming back and I will enter quiet

  like a cave and crouch with my knees drawn up

  till you birth me into squabbling bliss.

  I promise to relearn stillness like a spider.

  I will apprentice myself to pine trees.

  I will study the heron waiting on one foot.

  Only do not leave me empty as the skin

  the snake has cast on the path, ghostly

  colors fading and the sinuous hunter gone.

  Fill me roaring with your necessary music.

  Loose upon me your stories screaming for life,

  ravenous as gulls over a fishing boat.

  Or send the little dreams like gnats into my hair.

  Tease me with almost vision, flashes, scents

  that dangle barbs into the dark currents

  of memory. Use me however you will but

  use me. These little accidents are offerings

  to that Coming never accidental.

  Silk confetti

  Apple blossom petals lay on asphalt

  fallen from the tree at the road’s turn

  white as the flesh of the apple

  will be, flushed pink

  with the same blush

  tender and curved as cheeks;

  soft on hard; soon

  to be bruised to vague stains.

  Our best impulses often drop so

  and vanish under traffic. We will

  not know for months

  if they bore fruit.

  And whose creature am I?

  At times characters from my novels swarm through me,

  children of my mind, and possess me as dybbuks.

  My own shabby memories they have plucked and eaten

  till sometimes I cannot remember my own sorrows.

  In all that I value there is a core of mystery,

  in the seed that wriggles its new roots into the soil

  and whose pale head bursts the surface,

  in the dance where our bodies merge and reassemble,

  in the starving baby whose huge glazing eyes

  burned into my bones, in the look that passes

  between predator and prey before the death blow.

  I know of what rags and bones and clippings

  from frothing newsprint and poisonous glue

  my structures are built. Yet these creatures

  I have improvised like golem walk off and thrive.

  Between one and two thirds of our lives we spend

  in darkness, and the little lights we turn on

  make little holes in that great thick rich void.

  We are never done with knowing or with gnawing,

  but under the saying is whispering, touching

  and silence. Out of a given set of atoms

  we cast and recast the holy patterns new.

  In praise of gazebos

  Trellises bear the weight of roses,

  pole beans, grape vines, wisteria,

  yet a stake or posts with wires

  strung between gives as good support.

  They are expressions of pleasure,

  garden jewelry, gestures

  of proportion in the winter,

  cascades of avid tangled greenery

  in the full clamor of summer.

  Benches under trees, cedar chairs

  that overlook the tomatoes or the marsh

  gradually ripening from green to sand

  to bronze, a settee and table

  on the grass, why do these furnishings

  seem Victorian? We go out to play,

  fiercely and with bats, with balls,

  with rackets. We go out to bash our flesh

  on the rough granite boulder of our will.

  To sit among the shrubs and contemplate,

  not for a tan, not for the body’s

  honing, oiling or toning, but just

  to feed the eyes and scalded ears,

  to let a gentle light into the brain,

  to quiet the media babble, without radio,

  Walkman, blast box, to let cool

  the open hearth furnaces of ambition,

  is to shape a space left open for calm

  as if that harmony could shine down

  like sunlight on the scalp. Perhaps

  you say these little structures which contain

  no real furniture, work or tools

  are secret traps for catching silence.

  Let outside and inside blur in the light season.

  Build us pergolas, follies, arbors, terraces.

  Let us make our gardens half artful

  and half wild, to match our love.

  The Faithless

  Sleep, you jade smooth liar,

  you promised to come

  to me, come to me

  waiting here like a cut

  open melon ripe as summer.

  Sleep, you black velvet

  tomcat, where are you prowling?

  I set a trap of sheets

  clean and fresh as daisies,

  pillows like cloudy sighs.

  Sleep, you soft-bellied

  angel with feathered thighs,

  you tease my cheek with the brush

  of your wings. I reach

  for you but clutch air.

  Sleep, you fur-bottomed tramp,

  when I want you, you’re in

  everybody’s bed but my own.

  Take you for granted and you stalk

  me from the low point of every hour.

  Sleep, omnivorous billy goat,

  you gobble the kittens, the crows,

  the cop on duty, the fast horse,

  but me you leave on the plate

  like a cold shore dinner.

  Is this divorce permanent?

  Runneled with hope I lie down

  nightly longing to pass

  again under the fresh blessing

  of your weight and broad wings.

  If I had been called Sabrina or Ann, she said

  I’m the only poet with the name.

  Can you imagine a prima ballerina named

  Marge? Marge Curie, Nobel Prize wi
nner.

  Empress Marge. My lady Marge? Rhymes with

  large/charge/barge. Workingclass?

  Definitely. Any attempt to doll it up

  (Mar-gee? Mar-gette? Margelina?

  Margarine?) makes it worse. Name

  like an oilcan, like a bedroom

  slipper, like a box of baking soda,

  useful, plain; impossible for foreigners,

  from French to Japanese, to pronounce.

  My own grandmother called me what

  could only be rendered in English

  as Mousie. O my parents, what

  you did unto me, forever. Even

  my tombstone will look like a cartoon.

  The night the moon got drunk

  Up over the white shoulder of the dune

  the sand that scorched our soles

  now caresses our bare feet with cool compliance.

  The foundry of the sun is shut down.

  Where are the shallow caverns of shadow

  carved into the blinding desert light?

  Bowls of mist, pennons, traveling

  ghosts. Finally the moon floats belly

  up like a dead goldfish over the dune.

  Tonight it could not get free

  of the ocean wave but trails spume,

  White as salt, it seems to be dissolving.

  But it leers oddly. A tipsy moon

  wobbling, wavering over the sand

  as if it can’t find the way up.

  O drunken moon, you see too much

  peering down: mugging, stabbing, rape,

  the weak slipping into death,

  the abandoned raking the ceiling

  with the sharp claws of hunger.

  You watch lovers in every hamlet,

  in beds, in cars, in hammocks.

  You cross the cranky Atlantic

  and stuck up in the sky and lonely

  what do you see first but couples

  coupling on the Great Beach, among

  the shiny poison ivy leaves

  of the gentle slopes and sand tracks.

  No wonder you drink yourself tipsy

  on salt wine and go staggering now

  faded and crooked, still lecherous.

  Sweet ambush

  We all await the blackberries,

  stealthy as foxes, stopping by

  in August disguised as

  joggers, tourists, birdwatchers.

  They begin hard and green,

  baby hand-grenades. Slowly

  they blush. The red

  empurples like aging wine.

  The day they first glint

  with jet-bead shininess

  somebody pounces. Losers

  pick only the moldy and green.

  Blackberrying: the tiger

  hunting of scavenging.

  Tonight even before I take

  the pie from the oven,

  its crisp lattice steaming,

  my neighbor accuses, waving

  her fork like a weapon,

  You got blackberries today.

  My arms are scored

  as if by a lover too much

  in a hurry to bother

  with zippers and gentle tugs.

  Smug after a successful

  raid, I hold out arms

  etched with hieroglyphs.

  My mouth is purple inside.

  Blueberries are gentle.

  We squat among the bushes,

  picking, picking, picking.

  Only tedium limits our haul.

  With each berry in its season

  We wait to catch the very day

  its flavor petal by petal

  opens fully at last like a rose.

  The high arch of summer

  Light sharpens on the leaves

  of cotoneaster, just as it sparks

  off running water, shards of glitter

  ticking the eyes glad. As I go down,

  go down from the house, till it sinks

  setting behind the hill, even in pine

  woods the sun is hot to the bare sole

  on the white sand path. Resin

  thickens the air, invisible smoke.

  Here I am at peace eating handfuls

  of tart blueberries touched with bloom

  as the morning was coated with fog

  and huckleberries shiny and black

  as the last moonless night. Here I laze

  feeling the sun ripening my blood

  sweet as the tomatoes near the house

  in air that smells like air,

  by water that tastes of water.

  What we fail to notice

  The crimson and fragrant musk roses,

  the sweetest juicy blackberries,

  rake the arms with their brambles,

  slash the calves, but the small thorn

  that slides into the skin covertly

  unmarked by a bubble of blood

  causes the real trouble

  as the skin closes over

  and its thin red line of infection

  steals toward the heart.

  Tashlich

  Go to the ocean and throw the crumbs in,

  all that remains of seven years.

  When you wept, didn’t I taste your tears

  on my cheek, give you bread for salt?

  Here where I sing at full pitch

  and volume uncensored, I was attacked.

  The pale sister nibbled like a mouse

  in the closets with sharp pointy teeth.

  She let herself in with her own key.

  My trust garlanded her round. Indeed

  it was convenient to trust her

  while she wasted paper thin with envy.

  Here she coveted. Here she crept.

  Here her cold fluttering hands lingered

  on secrets and dipped into the honey.

  Her shadow fell on the contents of every drawer.

  Alone in the house she made love

  to herself in the mirror wearing

  stolen gowns; then she carried them home

  for their magic to color her life.

  Little losses spread like tooth decay.

  Furtive betrayals festered, cysts

  hidden in flesh. Her greed swelled

  in the dark, its hunger always roaring.

  No number of gifts could silence

  those cries of resentful hunger,

  not for the baubles, the scarves,

  the blouses she stole, but to be twenty

  and pretty again, not to have to work

  to live but merely to be blond and thin

  and let men happen like rain in the night

  and never to wake alone.

  On the new year my grandmother Hannah

  told me to carry crumbs to the water

  and cast them out. We are tossing

  away the trust that was too convenient

  and we are throwing evil from the house

  the rancid taint of envy spoiling the food

  the pricing fingers of envy rumpling the cloth

  the secret ill-wisher chewing from inside

  the heart’s red apple to rot it out.

  I cast away my anger like spoiled milk.

  Let the salty wind air the house and cleanse

  the stain of betrayal from the new year.

  This small and intimate place

  1.

  The moor land, the dry land ripples

  bronzed with blueberry. The precise

  small hills sculpted with glittering

  kinnikinnick broil under the sharp

  tack of the red-tailed hawk cruising

  in middle air. A vesper sparrow

  gives its repetitive shrill sad cry

  and the air shimmers with drought.

  The sea is always painting itself

  on the sky, which dips low here.

  Light floods the eyes tight and dry.

  Light scours out the skull

  like an
old kitchen sink made clean.

  We are cured in sunlight like salt cod.

  2.

  We are cured in sunlight like salt cod

  stiffened and rot repellent and long

  lived, long lasting. The year-rounders

  are poor. All summer they wait tables

  for the tourists, clean the houses

  of the summer people, sell them jam, fish,

  paintings, build their dwellings, wait

  for the land to be clean and still again.

  Yet blueberries, black- and elderberries,

  beach plum grow where vacation homes

  for psychiatrists are not yet built.

  We gather oysters, dig clams. We burn

  oak, locust, pitch pine and eat much fish

  as do the other scavengers, the gulls.

  3.

  As do the other scavengers, the gulls,

  we suffer, prey on the tides’ rise and ebb

  of plenty and disaster, the slick that chokes

  the fisheries, the restaurant sewage

  poisoning mussels, the dump leaching

  lead into the water table; the lucky winter

  storm that tosses up surf clams or squid

  in heaps for food, fertilizer, future plenty.

  This land is a tablet on which each pair

  of heels writes itself, the raw scar

  where the dirt bike crossed, the crushed

  tern chicks where the ORV roared through,

  the dune loosed over trodden grasses.

  We are intimate with wind and water here.

  4.

  We are intimate with wind. Once

  this was a land of windmills flapping

  sails like a stationary race of yachts.

  We learn the winds on face and shingles,

  the warm wind off the Gulf Stream in winter,

  the nor’easter piling up snow and wrecks,

  the west wind that hustles the rain clouds

  over and out to sea, the cold northwest.

  We are intimate with water, lapped around,

  the sea tearing at the land, castling it up,

  damp salty days with grey underworld light