My Mother's Body
but before the diet of thin gruel sun,
the winter putting it to us like a big
hard grey boot in the gut,
the storms that shovel us into their pit,
the snow that comes down like lace
and hardens to sludge in the gears:
A chance to be somebody else
before cabin fever turns you inside out
and counts your last resource
down to its copper head.
We dress like death whose time
of ascendance comes with the long
nights when the white moon freezes
on the snow and the fox hunts late,
his tail bannering, kill or starve.
I like the grinning pumpkinhead,
the skeleton mocking what will scatter it,
that puts on the face of its fears
and rollicks on the dead leaves
in the yard whooping and yowling.
Tonight you run in the streets,
brave because you wear a mask;
vampires do not worry about rape.
Witches wander the night like cats.
We bribe other people’s children
with sweets not to attack us.
We put on sheets and cut eyeholes
although we all know that when ghosts
come, they wear their old clothes
and stand suddenly in the hall
looking for a boot or muse at the window
or speak abruptly out of their own
unused and unusable passion.
For my true dead I say kaddish
and light the yartzeit candle.
No, tonight it is our own mortality
we mock with cartoon grimace,
our own bones we peel to, dancing,
our own end we celebrate.
Long night of sugar and skull
when we put on death’s clothes
and play act it like children.
Unbuttoning
The buttons lie jumbled in a tin
that once held good lapsang souchong
tea from China, smoky as the smell
from a wood stove in the country,
leaves opening to flavor and fate.
As I turn buttons over, they sound
like strange money being counted
toward a purchase as I point
dumbly in a foreign bazaar,
coins pittering from my hand.
Buttons are told with the fingers
like worry beads as I search
the trove for something small
and red to fill the missing
slot on a blouse placket.
I carried them from my mother’s
sewing table, a wise legacy
not only practical but better
able than fading snapshots
to conjure buried seasons.
Button stamped with an anchor
means my late grade-school pea coat.
Button in the form of a white
daisy from a sky blue dress
she wore, splashed with that flower,
rouses her face like a rosy dahlia
bent over me petaled with curls.
O sunflower hungry for joy
who turned her face through the years
bleak, withered, still yearning.
The tea was a present I brought
her from New York where she
had never gone and never would.
This mauve nub’s from a dress
once drenched in her blood;
This, from a coral dress she wore
the day she taught me that word,
summer ’41, in Florida:
“Watch the clipper ships take off
for Europe. Soon war will come to us.
“They will not rise so peacefully
for years. Over there they’re
killing us and nobody cares.
Remember always. Coral is built
of bodies of the dead piled up.”
Buttons are useful little monuments.
They fasten and keep decently
shut and warm. They also open.
Rattling in my hand, they’re shells
left by vanished flesh.
The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte
for Julian Mason
The eye of fire and the eye of copper and blood
glared at each other through the veil of smog:
I woke from my too soft bed in the too warm motel
scheduled to rise between them as they tipped,
a balancing as of two balls at the farthest extremity
by a juggler momentarily lucky but about to lose one.
I rose under that influence balanced between blindness
and sight, between the hammered and nailed structure
of the self whose ark we labor at to save us
from drowning in the salty pit of memories
washed into that sea from distant and eroded
lives, and that rising tide and falling rain
in which hungers are circling up to feed.
I rose from a dream in which I came
over a burning plain and entered a wood
in which the corpses were tied up in trees
for the birds to clean. There I lay on a platform
awaiting the sharp beaks of the carrion eaters
for I understood my bones must be released
and the moon passed over me and drew up my blood
as mist and the sun passed over me and baked
the last sweet water from my tissues.
When the great crow landed on my face I cried
Not yet, not yet, and the crow asked, Will you not
give over? and I cried Not yet, not yet.
I woke on the red clay of Carolina trembling.
My life felt like a fragile silk chemise
I pulled on over my head to slip through the day.
As I stood among weeds and traffic I saw the red
moon and red sun eyeing each other, rivals
who should not be in the same room. I hoped
a moment ripens into death fulfilled
when I will say Yes, now; but death arrives
from within, without and sudden as a pasteboard
box crushed by a foot, and still I balance
in midlife praying, Not yet, not yet.
Putting the good things away
In the drawer were folded fine
batiste slips embroidered with scrolls
and posies, edged with handmade
lace too good for her to wear.
Daily she put on schmatehs
fit only to wash the car
or the windows, rags
that had never been pretty
even when new: somewhere
such dresses are sold only
to women without money to waste
on themselves, on pleasure,
to women who hate their bodies,
to women whose lives close on them.
Such dresses come bleached by tears,
packed in salt like herring.
Yet she put the good things away
for the good day that must surely
come, when promises would open
like tulips their satin cups
for her to drink the sweet
sacramental wine of fulfillment.
The story shone in her as through
tinted glass, how the mother
gave up and did without
and was in the end crowned
with what? scallions? crowned
queen of the dead place
in the heart where old dreams
whistle on bone flutes,
where run-over pets are forgotten,
where lost stockings go?
In the coffin she was beautiful
not because of the undertaker’s
garish cosmetics but because
that f
ace at eighty was still
her face at eighteen peering
over the drab long dress
of poverty, clutching a book.
Where did you read your dreams, Mother?
Because her expression softened
from the pucker of disappointment,
the grimace of swallowed rage,
she looked a white-haired girl.
The anger turned inward, the anger
turned inward, where
could it go except to make pain?
It flowed into me with her milk.
Her anger annealed me.
I was dipped into the cauldron
of boiling rage and rose
a warrior and a witch
but still vulnerable
there where she held me.
She could always wound me
for she knew the secret places.
She could always touch me
for she knew the pressure
points of pleasure and pain.
Our minds were woven together.
I gave her presents and she hid
them away, wrapped in plastic.
Too good, she said, too good.
I’m saving them. So after her death
I sort them, the ugly things
that were sufficient for every
day and the pretty things for which
no day of hers was ever good enough.
The Crunch
Like the cat the doberman has trapped,
like the rabbit in the fox’s jaws
we feel the splintering of our bones
and wait for the moment that still may flash
the white space between pains
when we can break free.
It is the moment of damage
when already the pricing mind
tries to estimate cost and odds
while the nerves lean on their sirens
but the spine sounds a quiet tone
of command toward a tunnel of moment
that drills the air toward escape
or death. I have been caught.
Biology is destiny for all alive
but at the instant of tearing
open or free, the blood shrieks and
all my mother’s mothers groan.
What remains
These ashes are not the fine dust I imagined.
The undertaker brings them out from the back
in a plastic baggie, like supermarket produce.
I try not to grab, but my need shocks me,
how I hunger to seize this officially
labeled garbage and carry you off.
All the water was vaporized,
the tears, the blood, the sweat,
fluids of a juicy, steamy woman
burnt offering into the humid Florida
air among cement palm trees with brown
fronds stuck up top like feather dusters.
In the wind the palmettoes clatter.
The air is yellowed with dust.
I carry you back North where you belong
through the bumpy black December night
on the almost empty plane stopping
at every airport like a dog at posts.
Now I hold what is left in my hands
bone bits, segments of the arched skull
varicolored stones of the body,
green, copper, beige, black, purple
fragments of shells eroded by storm
that slowly color the beach.
Archeology in a plastic baggie.
Grit spills into my palms:
reconstruct your days, your odyssey.
These are fragments of a smashed mosaic
that formed the face of a dancer
with bound feet, cursing in dreams.
At the marriage of the cat and dog
I howl under the floor.
You will chew on each other’s bones
for years. You cannot read
the other’s body language.
On the same diet you starve.
My longest, oldest love, I have brought
you home to the land I am dug into.
I promise a path laid right to you,
roses to spring from you, herbs nearby,
the company of my dead cats
whose language you already know.
We’ll make your grave by piney woods,
a fine place to sit and sip wine,
to take the sun and watch the beans
grow, the tomatoes swell and redden.
You will smell rosemary, thyme,
and the small birds will come.
I promise to hold you in the mind
as a cupped hand protects a flame.
That is nothing to you. You cannot
hear. Yet just as I knew when you
really died, you know I have brought
you home. Now you want to be roses.
My mother’s body
1.
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
then hawk-faced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch,
yet fifteen hundred miles north
I heard and dropped a dish.
Your pain sunk talons in my skull
and crouched there cawing, heavy
as a great vessel filled with water,
oil or blood, till suddenly next day
the weight lifted and I knew your mind
had guttered out like the Chanukah
candles that burn so fast, weeping
veils of wax down the chanukiyot.
Those candles were laid out,
friends invited, ingredients bought
for latkes and apple pancakes,
that holiday for liberation
and the winter solstice
when tops turn like little planets.
Shall you have all or nothing
take half or pass by untouched?
Nothing you got, Nun said the dreidl
as the room stopped spinning.
The angel folded you up like laundry
your body thin as an empty dress.
Your clothes were curtains
hanging on the window of what had
been your flesh and now was glass.
Outside in Florida shopping plazas
loudspeakers blared Christmas carols
and palm trees were decked with blinking
lights. Except by the tourist
hotels, the beaches were empty.
Pelicans with pregnant pouches
flapped overhead like pterodactyls.
In my mind I felt you die.
First the pain lifted and then
you flickered and went out.
2.
I walk through the rooms of memory.
Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,
every chair ghostly and muted.
Other times memory lights up from within
bustling scenes acted just the other side
of a scrim through which surely I could reach
my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain
of time which is and isn’t and will be
the stuff of which we’re made and unmade.
In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen,
your first nasty marriage just annulled,
thin from your abortion, clutching a book
against your cheek and trying to look
older, trying to look middle class,
trying for a job at Wanamaker’s,
dressing for parties in cast-off
stage costumes of your sisters’. Your eyes
&nb
sp; were hazy with dreams. You did not
notice me waving as you wandered
past and I saw your slip was showing.
You stood still while I fixed your clothes,
as if I were your mother. Remember me
combing your springy black hair, ringlets
that seemed metallic, glittering;
remember me dressing you, my seventy-year-
old mother who was my last doll baby,
giving you too late what your youth had wanted.
3.
What is this mask of skin we wear,
what is this dress of flesh,
this coat of few colors and little hair?
This voluptuous seething heap of desires
and fears, squeaking mice turned up
in a steaming haystack with their babies?
This coat has been handed down, an heirloom,
this coat of black hair and ample flesh,
this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.
This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks,
they provided cushioning for my grandmother
Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me
and we all sat on them in turn, those major
muscles on which we walk and walk and walk
over the earth in search of peace and plenty.
My mother is my mirror and I am hers.
What do we see? Our face grown young again,
our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.
Our arms quivering with fat, eyes
set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,
our belly seamed with childbearing.
Give me your dress so I can try it on.
Oh it will not fit you, Mother, you are too fat.
I will not fit you, Mother.
I will not be the bride you can dress,
the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,
a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth.
You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.
Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks
barbed and drawing blood with their caress.
My twin, my sister, my lost love,
I carry you in me like an embryo
as once you carried me.
4.
What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?