My Mother's Body (4 page)

What makes it good

Is that we came to this

Having each tasted freely

Of the sweet plum flesh of others.

So your head will not turn?

It may turn.

But my feet won't follow.

What makes it good

Is that we came to this slowly

Not blind or in white fever

Tearing off our clothes running

But walking arm around shoulder

Friends.

So you will not fight?

We will fight

Fists balled, throats

Full to choking

But we have learned

How to stop

Before the blade hits the throat.

What makes it good

Is that we give each other

Freedom, for the laughter

Of others.

So you've never had to give up friends?

I have given up

My gang of boys.

They wanted me to trade

Her for them

But why trade

When you have what you want?

What makes it good

Is that neither dawdles thinking

My lover kept me back.

So you are not ambitious?

I am ambitious.

And what will you do about her?

Take her with me.

And if you go nowhere?

It is no fault of hers.

What makes it good

Is that we

Both

Want it bad,

To be good.

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks

and flourished, like a weed

that discovers itself to bear rugged

spikes of magenta blossom in August,

ironweed sturdy and bold,

a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the State?

Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?

Why risk the whole apparatus of roles

and rules, of laws and liabilities?

Why license our bed at the foot

like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal

word stones, with the old armor

of husband and the corset stays

and the chains of wife? Marriage

meant buying a breeding womb

and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women

have burst their hearts sooner

than those walls; boxes of private

slow murder and the fading of the bloom

in the blood; boxes in which secret

bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language

of new grunts. We start where we find

ourselves, at this time and place

which is always the crossing of roads

that began beyond the earth's curve

but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends

that we want to stay together. We want

to share our lives. We mean to pledge

ourselves through times of broken stone

and seasons of rose and ripe plum;

we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

We come together

Pure and ample

Top-heavy woman

Stocky man

Midwestern half-breed

Long Island Jew.

Jew with eyes of jade

Jew with eyes of almonds

Jews with tempers

Like the blue serpent tongue

Of the lightning that cracks

The sky over our land.

We come together strong

Strong as our passion to lie

Skin pressed to skin, quivering.

Strong as our hunger

To tell, to taste, to know.

I am lucky to have you

I know it.

But with each windfall

Comes the tax

With each rainfall

The weeds

To kneel and pull.

We give and take

With no line between.

We grow our food.

We heal our wounds.

You remind me

Good writing takes time,

I bolster you

When the world attacks.

We came together

Each an other,

Sister brother

Mother son

Father daughter

Man and woman.

We lick each other's skins like lost kittens.

Fight like starving strays.

We talk deep into the night

Make each other coffee

Keep each other straight.

We are scrub oak

Strong and low

Peony

Full bodied, brilliant

Feast for the butterfly

Feast for the ant.

Our love is like the land.

We work to keep it fertile.

The way the grain of you runs

wavy and strong as maple.

Black grapes warm in the hand,

the bloom on them like mist,

breathe their scent in gusts:

dusk of a summer evening.

In sleep you shimmer heat

banked like a Russian stove.

How wide you open to me,

a volcano gaping its belly

of fire all the way to the molten

core; a tree whose every leaf

is a mouth drinking sunshine

whose roots are all mouths.

Our life is a daily fugue

polyphonic, with odd harmonies

that make the bones vibrate

secretly, sweetly in the flesh

the way a divining rod shivers

over veins of water, or power.

Red is the body's own deep song,

the color of lips, of our busy

organs, heart and stomach and lungs,

the color of our roused genitals,

the color of tongues and the flag of our blood.

Red is the loudest color

and the most secret

lurking inside the clothes' cocoon,

banked in the dark of the nightly bed

like coals shimmering in a stove.

It is the hot color, the active

that dances into your eye leaping,

that goads and pricks you

with its thorn of fire,

that shouts and urges and commands.

But red coils in the wineglass

head into tail like a dozing cat

whose eyes have shut but who purrs still

the pleasure of your hand, whose

warmth gently loosens the wine's aroma

so it rises like a perfumed ghost

inside the chambers of your nose.

In the mouth wine opens

its hundred petals like a damask rose

and then subsides, swallowed to afterglow.

In the wine press of the bed

of all the salty flows of our bodies,

the heat of our love ferments

our roundness into the midnight red

flowering of the wine

that can make drunken and make warm

that can comfort and quicken the sluggish

that can ease the weary body into sleep

that can frame the dark bread and cheese

into feast, that can celebrate

and sing through the wine of the body,

its own bright blood that rushes

to every cranny and cove of the flesh

and dark of the bone, the joy in love

that is the wine of life.

The chuppah stands on four poles.

The home has its four corners.

The chuppah stands on four poles.

The marriage stands on four legs.

Four points loose the winds

that blow on the walls of the house,

the south wind that brings the warm rain,

the east wind that brings the cold rain,

the north wind that brings the cold sun

and the snow, the long west wind

bringing the weather off the far plains.

Here we live open to the seasons.

Here the winds caress and cuff us

contrary and fierce as bears.

Here the winds are caught and snarling

in the pines, a cat in a net clawing

breaking twigs to fight loose.

Here the winds brush your face

soft in the morning as feathers

that float down from a dove's breast.

Here the moon sails up out of the ocean

dripping like a just washed apple.

Here the sun wakes us like a baby.

Therefore the chuppah has no sides.

It is not a box.

It is not a coffin.

It is not a dead end.

Therefore the chuppah has no walls

We have made a home together

open to the weather of our time.

We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle

converting fierce energy into bread.

The canopy is the cloth of our table

where we share fruit and vegetables

of our labor, where our care for the earth

comes back and we take its body in ours.

The canopy is the cover of our bed

where our bodies open their portals wide,

where we eat and drink the blood

of our love, where the skin shines red

as a swallowed sunrise and we burn

in one furnace of joy molten as steel

and the dream is flesh and flower.

O my love O my love we dance

under the chuppah standing over us

like an animal on its four legs,

like a table on which we set our love

as a feast, like a tent

under which we work

not safe but no longer solitary

in the searing heat of our time.

Before we clean, we scream

accusatory, rowdy as gulls.

We screech, we bark, we flap.

Abruptly we subside and start.

Always it is two weeks past

the last endurable point.

It is destiny we grovel to,

that if we do not clean

we will smother in our own dirt.

We mutter and swot and heave.

We scrub and spray and haul out.

The vacuum cleaner chokes on a tissue

ball, its bag exploding; some cat

vomited behind the heaviest couch.

Dusted cobwebs fall on the scrubbed counter.

O house, neat as a stamp collection,

everything in its place ordained

glimmering with propriety at last.

Invite all our friends to dinner,

summon the neighbors who call

this the jungle. Let in the cats

to roll on the clean carpets.

By the next day it looks like

a rummage sale at five o'clock.

This box of house, like a child's

treasure trove of colored stones, blue jay

and pheasant feathers, random playing cards,

is irrational in the pleasure it proffers

those who fill it slowly

with the detritus and the clothing

of their living. It is the burrow

of a sand worm decorated with pebble

and shell the tides bring in.

This house is part toy: we move lamps

and chairs about exactly as I did

in my dollhouse, where I first played

at creation and fashioned dramas,

gave names to china animals, like Adam;

and like a god, invented rules.

This house is part clothing, a warm

coat that keeps us snug from the cold,

a huge raincoat that covers us dry.

It is our facade to friend and stranger,

stuck over with emblems of our taste,

our friends, our flush times, our travels,

our previous misadventures.

This house displays our virtue to each other.

I swept the kitchen floor twice this week.

But
I
took the trash to the dump Tuesday.

I am putting up shelves, so kiss me.

See how the freshly polished table shines

like a red, red apple with love.

This house is a nest in which the eggs

of worries hatch fledglings

of cowbird's young who usurp the care

and push the right nestlings out.

This house eats money and shits bills.

Bed, table, desk: here is the hearth of love.

I am territorial as my cats. When I return

I stroll the house singing arias of the familiar.

I leave here on a long tether that pulls

hard in the day and harder at night.

At two a rabbit screamed.

A splash of blood on the floodlit needles.

The mice of the ashy dawn

nibbled my salted eyelashes.

Outside, the rough gears of the world

clanked on, bodies smashed

on every spoke and sprocket

oiling those grim wheels.

I dreamed your step, your warmth

against my side and woke to see

the weird grey stars of terror

wheeling around the pole of midnight.

The tears I spouted sleepless nights,

they are spangled on the grasses

among the small webs like flimsy tents,

now traps and prisms of the sun.

I am entire, grafted together,

satiated with you and shining

inside and outside, a hot orange,

liquid all through with joy.

Let me web and petal you with kisses,

let me deck you with love baubles

like a rich Christmas tree, hung

with totems and birds and lights.

My love is peeled to its prickly

bleeding quick. I want to lick you over

like a mother cat. Each hair of your

head is numbered in my love.

Come let us raise our tent of skin.

Let me wrap you in the night of my hair

so our legs climb each other like pea vines.

The tiger lily is open on the freckled hour.

Bite into its ruddiness, a peach

splitting with ripeness and juice.

I stood in the sugar cane

near Cienfuegos and bit on the green

fibrous stem and the sweetness flowed.

We plunge into each other as into a pool

that closes over our heads. We float

suspended in liquid velvet.

The light comes from behind the eyes,

red, soft, thick as blood, ancient as sleep.

We build each other with our hands.

That is where flesh is translucent as water.

That is where flesh shines with its own light.

That is where flesh ripples as you walk

through it like fog and it closes around you.

That is where boundaries fail and wink out.

Flesh dreams down to rock and up to fire.

Here ego dissolves, a slug in vinegar,

although its loud demands will come back

like a bounced check as soon as we rise.

But this dim red place that waits at the pit

of the pool is real as the bone in the flesh

and there we make love as you make a table

where the blood roars like an ocean in the ears

remembering its source, and we remember

how we are bound and body of each other.