My Mother's Body (2 page)

Months before you died, you had us drive

south to Florida because you insisted

you wanted to give me things I must carry back.

What were they? Some photographs, china

animals my brother had brought home from

World War II, a set of silverplate.

Then the last evening while Father watched

a game show, you began pulling out dollar

bills, saying
Shush, don't let him

see, don't let him know
. A five-dollar

bill stuffed under the bobbypins,

ten dollars furled in an umbrella,

wads of singles in the bottom of closet

dividers full of clothes. You shoved

them in my hands, into my purse,

you thrust them at Woody and me.

Take
, you kept saying,
I want you to have

it, now while I can, take
.

That night in the hotel room

we sat on the floor counting money

as if we had robbed a candy store:

eighteen hundred in nothing larger

than a twenty, squirreled away, saved

I can't stand to imagine how.

That was the gift you had that felt

so immense to you we would need a car

to haul it back, maybe a trailer too,

the labor of your small deceit

that you might give me an inheritance,

that limp wad salvaged from your sweat.

Until I tasted the blood spurt in my mouth

bursting its sour clots, and the air

forced my bucking lungs and I choked,

I did not know I had been dead.

The lint of voices consulting over me.

Didn't I leave myself to them,

an inheritance of sugared almond memories,

wedding cake slabs drying in their heads?

They carried me home and they ate me,

angel fluff with icing.

Now I return coiling and striking

on the slippery deck of dawn like a water

snake caught in a net, all fangs

and scales and slime and lashing tail.

I have crawled up from dankness

spitting headstones like broken teeth.

My breath spoils milk. My eyes

shine red as Antares in the scorpion's tail

and my touch sticks like mud.

I have been nothing

who now put on my body like an apron

facing a sink of greasy dishes.

Right here pain welded my ribs, here

my heart still smokes. My life hangs triggered

ready to trap me if I raise a hand.

Dresses flap and flutter about me

while my bones whistle

and my flesh rusts neuter as iron.

The rooms of my life wait

to pack me in boxes.

My eyes bleed. My eardrums

are pierced with a hot wire of singing

that only crows and hawks could harmonize.

My best dress splits from neck to hem.

Howling I trot for the brushlands with yellow

teeth blinking, hair growing out like ragweed

and new claws clicking on stone

that I must wear dull

before I can bear again

the smell of kitchens

the smell of love.

Among my mother's things I found

a bottle-cap flower: the top

from a ginger ale

into which had been glued

crystalline beads from a necklace

surrounding a blue bauble.

It is not unattractive,

this star-shaped posy

in the wreath of fluted

aluminum, but it is not

as a thing of beauty

that I carried it off.

A receding vista opens

of workingclass making do:

the dress that becomes

a blouse that becomes

a doll dress, potholders,

rags to wash windows.

Petunias in the tire.

Remnants of old rugs

laid down over the holes

in rugs that had once

been new when the remnants

were first old.

A three-inch birch-bark

canoe labeled Muskegon,

little wooden shoes

souvenirs of Holland, Mich.,

an ashtray from the Blue Hole,

reputed bottomless.

Look out the window

at the sulphur sky.

The street is grey as

newspapers. Rats

waddle up the alley.

The air is brown.

If we make curtains

of the rose-bedecked table

cloth, the stain won't show

and it will be cheerful,

cheerful. Paint the wall lime.

Paint it turquoise, primrose.

How I used to dream

in Detroit of deep cobalt,

of ochre reds, of cadmium

yellow. I dreamed of sea

and burning sun, of red

islands and blue volcanos.

After she washed the floors

she used to put down newspapers

to keep them clean. When

the newspapers had become

dirty, the floor beneath

was no longer clean.

In the window, ceramic

bunnies sprouted cactus.

A burro offered fuchsia.

In the hat, a wandering Jew.

That was your grandfather
.

He spoke nine languages
.

Don't you ever want to

travel?
I did when I

was younger. Now, what

would be the point?

Who would want to meet me?

I'd be ashamed
.

One night alone she sat

at her kitchen table

gluing baubles in a cap.

When she had finished,

pleased, she hid it away

where no one could see.

Our Mardi Gras is this, not before

a season of fasting dictated once

by the bare cupboard of late winter,

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.

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.

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.

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 face 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.