My Mother's Body (6 page)

In the bed Dinah curls,

kittens tumbling over kittens

at nipples pink and upright

against the silver blue fur.

Her mrow interrogates.

The second night she toted

them one by one into my bed

arranged them against my flank

nuzzling, then took off

flirting her tail.

Birthing box, bottoms

of closets, dark places,

the hell with that. She

crawled between my legs

when her water broke.

Think of them as
ours

she urges us, have you

heard of any decent day care?

I think kitten raising

should be a truly collective

process, and besides, it's all

your fault. You gave me

to that little silver-

balled brute to do his will

upon me. Now look.

Here I am a hot-water

bottle, an assembly line

of tits, a milk factory.

The least you can do

is take the night feeding.

The woman who shines with a dull comfortable glow.

The woman who sweats honey, an aphid

enrolled to sweeten the lives of others.

The woman who puts down her work like knitting

the moment you speak, but somehow it gets done

secretly in the night while everyone sleeps.

The woman whose lap is wide as the Nile

delta, whose flesh is a lullaby

of goosedown petals lacking the bite

of menace real lullabies ride on

(if the bough breaks, birds

and butterflies pecking out his eyes).

Whose own eyes are soft-focus mirrors.

Whose arms are bolsters. Whose love

is laid on like the municipal water.

She is not the mother goddess, vortex

of dark and light powers with her consorts,

her hungers, her favorites, her temper

blasting the corn so it withers in its ear,

her bloody humor that sends the hunter fleeing

to be tracked and torn by his hounds,

the great door into the earth's darkness

where bones are rewoven into wheat,

who loves the hawk as she loves the rabbit.

Big mama has no power, not even over herself.

The taxpayer of guilt, whatever she gives

you both agree is never enough.

She is a one-way street down which pour

parades of opulent gifts and admiration

from a three-shift factory of love.

Magic mama has to make it right, straighten

the crooked, ease pain, raise the darkness,

feed the hungry and matchmake for the lonesome

and ask nothing in return. If you win

you no longer know her, and if you lose

it is because her goodness failed you.

Whenever you create big mama from another

woman's smile, a generosity of spirit working

like yeast in the inert matter of the day,

you are stealing from a woman her own ripe

grape sweet desire, the must of her fears,

the shadow she casts into her own future

and turning her into a diaper service,

the cleaning lady of your adventure.

Who thanks a light bulb for giving light?

Listen, your mother is not your mother.

She is herself and unmothered. It is time

to take the apron off your mind.

You are rumpled like a sweater

smelling of burnt leaves and dried sea grasses.

Your smile belongs to an archaic boy of wasting stone on Delos.

You change shape like spilled mercury.

There is no part of you that touches me

not even your laugh catching like fur in your nose.

I am with you on a glacier

white snowfield gouged with blue-green crevasses

deep and the color of your eyes.

There is no place to go, we cannot lie down.

In the distance your people wait checking their gear.

We blaze like a refinery on the ice.

A dry snow begins to descend

as your hands fall clasped to your sides

as your eyes freeze to the rim of the sky.

Already I cannot see you for the snow.

Heavy iron gates like those in a levee or fortress

are closing in my breasts.

The world smelled like a mattress you find

on the street and leave there,

or like a humid house reciting yesterday's

dinner menu and the day before's.

Everybody had breathed this air repeatedly

and used it to cool an engine.

Oil hung in the sky in queasy clouds.

Then the rain swept through slamming doors.

Today is blue as a cornflower,

tall as a steel tower,

springy as a trampoline.

Beside the drive the ruffs of Queen Anne's lace

are host to the striped caterpillar

that probes with its roan horns.

Dry as the white dunes under sunlight, the day

smells of cut curing grasses beige as Siamese cats.

The cicadas like little chainsaws inflame the air.

All things bear sharp corners of a pane of glass.

What a clean unused day to walk all over.

On such a morning I can almost believe

something blue and green and yellow

may survive us after we explode

and burn the sky down.

Some shoot may sprout and grow.

We do not inherit the world from our parents
,

we borrow it from our children
.                    

Gandhi

The dreams of the children

reek of char and ashes.

The fears of the children

peer out through the brown eyes

of a calf tethered away from its mother,

a calf who bawls for the unknown

bad thing about to happen

as the butcher's truck arrives.

The children finger their own sharp

bones in their wrists.

They knead their foreheads gingerly.

Last night I dreamed Mother was burning,

the little girl said in class,

my father, my dog, my brother,

fire was eating them all.

I wrote three postcards to the President.

I won't be anything when I grow up,

the boy said, I won't live that long.

I don't like firecrackers anymore.

I always draw houses falling.

Blood seeps from the roof of the cave

of their minds, fear becoming rock.

In their dreams there is one great

loud noise. Then weeping. Then silence.

I suppose no one has ever died of a head cold

while not fearing or fervently

wishing to do so on the hour,

gasping through a nose the size of Detroit.

My mouth tastes of moldy sneaker.

My tongue is big as a liverwurst.

My throat steams like a sewer.

The gnome of snot has stuck a bicycle pump in my ear.

I am a quagmire, a slithy bog.

I exude effluvia, mumbled curses,

and a dropsy of wads of paper,

handkerchiefs like little leprosies.

The world is an irritant

full of friends jumping in noisy frolic.

The damned healthy: I breathe on them.

My germs are my only comfort.

You'll do it, what you really want.

You'll start counting, you'll

feel everything direct as rain

on your skin in mild May twilight.

You'll start chewing every moment

like fresh corn on the cob hot

buttered and actually enjoy it

as soon as you grow up, leave home,

after you've got your diploma,

when you've passed your orals,

when you finish psychoanalysis,

as soon as you meet the one woman for you,

when Mr. Right comes charging along,

after you pay off the mortgage,

as soon as the children are in school,

when you finally get the divorce,

after the children finish college,

when you're promoted as you deserve,

when you're a complete success at last,

after you retire to Florida,

when you die and go to heaven.

You'll have considerable practice

at being dead by then.

My first political act? I am seeing

two doors that usually stood open,

leaning together like gossips, making

a closet of their corner.

A mangle stood there, for ironing

what I never thought needed it:

sheets, towels, my father's underwear;

an upright vacuum with its stuffed

sausage bag that deflated with a gusty

sigh as if weary of housework as I,

who swore I would never dust or sweep

after I left home, who hated

to see my mother removing daily

the sludge the air lay down like a snail's track

so that when in school I read of Sisyphus

and his rock, it was her I

thought of, housewife scrubbing

on raw knees as the factories rained ash.

Nasty stork king of the hobnobbing

doors was a wooden yardstick dusty

with chalk marks from hems' rise and fall.

When I had been judged truly wicked

that stick was the tool of punishment.

I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive

as if noise could ward off blows.

My mother wielded it more fiercely

but my father far longer and harder.

I'd twist my head in the mirror to inspect.

I'd study those red and blue mountain

ranges as on a map that offered escape,

the veins and arteries the roads

I could travel to freedom when I grew.

When I was eleven, after a beating

I took and smashed the ruler to kindling.

Fingering the splinters I could not believe.

How could this rod prove weaker than me?

It was not that I was never again beaten

but in destroying that stick that had measured my pain

the next day I was an adolescent, not a child.

This is not a tale of innocence lost but power

gained: I would not be Sisyphus.

There were things that I should learn to break.

Paper birds:

can they fly?

Not far.

Can they dive after fish?

Do they lay edible eggs?

Do they eat harmful insects?

No, but they sing

both long and short

and scratch real fleas.

Can you cook them?

How do they taste?

Like you. Like me.

They fill the mind

but half an hour later

you want more.

How many kinds are there?

They evolve, like other

birds, fill empty niches,

become extinct.

But each species

is composed of only one.

How do they reproduce then?

By fission. By fusion.

By one hell of a lot of work.

The woman carefully dressed

in quasimale drag

fashionable among her friends

spoke scornfully from the podium

of bourgeois housewives.

Bourgeois? Someone who works

for nothing

who owns zip,

who receives no pension,

who possesses no credit, no name.

I thought the bourgeoisie

owned the means of production?

She is a means of reproduction

leased by her husband,

liable to be traded in.

Those widows who live on cat food,

those ladies who eat in cafeterias

once a day, taking fifteen

minutes to choose their only dish,

their houses have deserted them.

This bag lady chewing stale hot-

dog buns from the garbage igloo,

who pees in the alley squatting,

who sleeps in an abandoned car,

was a bourgeois housewife.

Your superiority licks itself

like a pleased cat. No housewife

is bourgeois any more than pets

are, just one owner away

from the streets and starvation.

Over the shoulder peer cartoon images

of skinny misers and bloated bankers

disinheriting wayward daughters in love

with honest workingclass boys;

the dowager in her bed writing in

the gardener, writing out her nephew.

Little goes the way we plan it

even with us to knead and pull,

stir and sweeten and cook it down.

How many scenes written flat on the back

in bed ever play in the moonlight?

How often revenge bubbles itself flat.

Given wobbly control with all our

muscle and guile and wit bearing down

like a squad of tactical police,

how do we suppose when we're ashes

what we think we want will matter?

Less than the spider in the rafters.

We cannot protect those we love

no matter how we gild and dip them

in the molten plastic of our care;

when we are gone our formulae

in legal sludge guarantee nothing

but that all lawyer's fees be paid.

Maybe it is an act of faith

not in anything but the goodwill

of a few, those documents of intent

we scatter in which we claim sound mind

and try to stuff a log in the jaws

of fate to keep those teeth from closing.

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.