My Mother's Body (7 page)

We have glass eyes and rubber fingers.

Our minds are industrial dumps,

full of chemical residues, reruns,

jeans commercials and the asses

of people we have never touched.

The camera sees for us.

Our pets act out our emotions.

Quiet has to be waited into.

Can I learn to coil, a snake

on a warm flat rock? Can I stand

eyes and ears open

hands up like a daisy?

Can I learn to see what the fox

contemplates, paws tucked and smiling?

My bones have forgotten

how to fall through the moment

to float leaf-light and land

like a sheet of paper.

Will a teacher come

if I wait in the orange light

on top of this dune?

See the sparrow hawk stand in the air

balancing the keel of her breastbone

on the surges of wind and warmth:

till she strikes hard,

how the pressures sustain her

exact and teetering

on blurred wings.

When vittles must keep on a shelf for years

like newsprint slowly yellowing, when food

can't be bitter or spicy or hot or sour,

then people drink sweet pop, gobble sweet cupcakes

under icings and pour sugar on presweetened

breakfast crunchies and eat iceberg lettuce

with thick orange corn-syrup dressing, sugar

in the hamburgers and fish sticks.

Swelling in our soft mounded flesh, instead

of ornery people, we want our food to love us.

The child learns: Love is sugar.

She grows up sucking, chewing, nibbling

and is still and always hungry in her cancerous

cells busy and angry as swarming ants.

The longings of women:

butterflies beating against

ceilings painted blue like sky;

flies buzzing and thumping their heads

against the pane to get out.

They die and are swept off

in a feather duster.

The hopes of women are pinned

after cyanide by rows

labeled in Latin

the fragile wings fading.

The keeper speaks with melancholy

of how beautiful they were

as if he had not killed them.

The anger of women runs like small

brown ants you step on,

swarming in cracks in the pavement,

marching in long queues

through the foundation and inside,

nameless, for our names

are not yet our own.

But we are many and hungry

and our teeth though small are sharp.

If we move together

there is no wall we cannot erode

dust-grain by speck, and the lion

when he lies down is prey

to the army of ants.

Put away.

They do that to pets:

He was suffering. We

had him put away.

They do that to women: She wouldn't

do the dishes, she heard Saint

Catherine telling her to prophesy in the street.

He had her put away.

Refuse: the garbage, that

which is refused, which is denied,

which is discarded.

The crime of the women in the locked ward

was asking for help.

If you beg from the wrong people

they chop off your hands,

the old woman said to me.

My companion made a sign

with her fingers, but I did

not think the old lady

mistaken. Her hands rattled

like dead leaves from Thorazine.

She said, I can't hold a pen

but it can hold me.

The powerful make and break laws.

The weak flee to the bus

station, their purses stuffed

with tissues and old letters.

The weak rush into the closet

where the dresses smell like Mother,

into the mirror and through the wall

into the maze of dreams.

You are punished for wrong thinking

by having your brain burnt out

as the Koran bids you cut off

the hand of a thief.

The bodies of the witches were burned

alive in the millions. What

barbarity. We burn only brains.

My old cat lives under a chair.

Her long fur conceals the sharp

jut of her fleshless bones.

Her eyes are dimmed by clouds

of cataract, only visible

if you remember their willow green

as I could judge my mother's

by calling up that fierce charred

brown gaze, smiting, searching.

When one of the young cats approaches

she growls in anger harmless

as distant thunder. They steal her food.

They do not act from malice.

They would curl up with her and wash.

She hisses fear. Her lifelong

companion died. They appeared.

Surely the young bear the blame

for all the changes that menace

in the fog of grey shapes looming.

Her senses that like new snow

had registered the brush strokes

of tracks, the fall of a pine needle,

the alighting of a chickadee;

her senses that had opened

greedy as the uncurling petals

of a sea anemone that drinks

the world's news from the current;

that tantalized her with message

of vole and shrew and rabbit,

boasting homage her lovers sprayed,

have failed her like an old

hanging bridge that decays

letting her drop through in terror

to the cold swift river beneath.

In her ears is her blood rushing.

The light is trickling away.

One day this week my father

briefly emerged from the burrow

he bought himself lined with nurses.

When he gets me on the phone

he never believes it's me.

When I insist, he swells with anger.

He really wants to phone my mother.

Often he calls me by her name

but every time I fail him.

I am the dead woman in body,

hips and breasts and thighs,

elbows and chin and earlobes,

black black hair as at the age

she bore me, when he still

loved her, here she stands,

but when I open my mouth

it's the wrong year and the world

bristles with women who make short

hard statements like men and don't

apologize enough, who don't cry

when he yells or makes a fist.

He tells me I have stolen his stamps

down in Florida, the bad utopia

where he must share a television.

You took my nail scissors, he shouts

but means I stole his vigor

deposited in his checkbook like a giant's

external soul. I have his checkbook

and sign, power of attorney,

as I pay his doctors, doctors,

doctors, as I hunch with calculator

trying to balance accounts. We each

feel enslaved to the other's will.

Father, I don't want your little pot

of nuggets secreted by bad living

hidden in the mattress of Merrill Lynch

in an account you haven't touched

for twenty years, stocks that soared,

plummeted, doddering along now

in their own mad dinosaur race.

That stock is the doctor that Mother

couldn't call when she had the first

stroke, the dress she didn't get,

at eighty-six still scrubbing, cooking,

toting heavy laundry. The dentist

I couldn't go to so I chewed

aspirin as my teeth broke

at fifteen when I went out to work,

all the pleasures, the easing of pain

you could have bought with both

your endless hard mutual labor.

The ghostly dust bowl roared in the mind

afterward, the desert of want

where you would surely perish and starve

if you did not hide away pennies of power,

make do, make do, hold hard,

build a fortress of petrified dollars

stuck together like papier-mâché

so the tempest of want

could be shut out to howl at others.

Dirty little shacks, a rooming-

house Mother ran for decades,

a trailer park; after she died

you bought into Total Life Care,

a tower of middle-class comfort

where you could sit down to lunch

declaring, My broker says.

But nobody would listen. Only

Mother had to listen and she is dead.

You hid alone in your room fighting

with the cleaning woman who came

each week but didn't do it right,

then finally one midnight wandered out naked

finally to the world among rustling

palms demanding someone make you lunch.

I wouldn't sign papers to commit

you but they found a doctor who would.

Now you mutter around the ward,

This was supposed to be fun
.

Do you see your future in the bent

ones who whimper into their laps,

who glare at walls through which

the faces of the absent peer, who hear

conspiracy mutter in the plumbing?

I am the bad daughter who could speak

with my mother's voice if I wanted,

because I wear her face, who ought

to be cooking your meals, who ought

to be running the vacuum you bought

her, but instead I pretend

I am married, pretend to be writing

books and giving speeches.

You won't forgive her ever for dying

but I heard you call the night nurse

by her name. You speak of the fog

you see in the room. Greyness

is blowing in, the fog that took

my mother while you slept,

the fog that shriveled your muscles,

the fog that thickens between you

and strangers here where all

is provided and nothing is wanted.

The sun blasts on, flat and blatant.

Everything was built yesterday

but you. Nobody here remembers

the strike when you walked the picket line

joking with sleet freezing your hair,

how you stood against the flaming wall

of steel and found the cracked bearing,

how you alone could make the old turbines

turn over, how you had the wife

other men watched when she swayed

over the grass at the company picnic,

how you could drink them all witless.

You're a shadow swallowed by fog.

Through your eyes it enters your brain.

When it lifts you see only pastel

walls and then your anger standing there

gleaming like a four-hundred-horsepower car

you have lost your license to drive.

Once a hillside above a marsh,

a swell of sand and clay sprouting

pines, white oaks, blueberry bushes.

A friend who came along to view

the lot pissed into the bushes.

A red-shouldered hawk rose

from a rabbit carcass furious

sputtering and wet.

Yet when the builders finished

the land was undone,

the house a box gouged into sand,

the hillside stripped

washing down into the road below.

I planted and terraced to hold

the land. Then this became

my only graphic artwork,

painting with greys and greens,

the four-dimensional sculpture

of the garden, every two weeks recoloring,

the angular, the globular,

the tousled, the spiky, the lush.

Collage of fragrances, sweet,

spicy, acrid, subtle, banging.

Once I watched my female Burmese

Colette pass along the herb

garden savoring, rubbing her cheek

into the funky leaves, but at the anise

hyssop she sniffed at it and hissed,

as if its odor spoke to her rudely.

Cats would have a thousand names for scent.

Dogwood, honeysuckle, autumn olive

bore berries and summoned birds

to stir the air of the hillside,

to scuttle in the underbrush kicking

up leaves, to flit through branches.

Every person who has lived here

has carved initials on the land:

that path, that fence, those steps, that shed.

What draws the eye and hand initially,

what charms, is after we move in

changed by us.

The lover alters

the beloved by her love,

even by that hot and tender regard.

What we make is part the other

and part us, and what we become

in our new love is someone

born from both.

A spider nests in the frying pan

this Wednesday morning; a jumping

spider stalks prey on the window

ledge among bottles; little black

spider is suddenly swimming

in my wineglass; hairy king

kong spider swings from the rafters

to the oil painting; spider

crouches in my sneaker; spider

bobbles on the end of an escape

filament acrobatic over my typewriter

in front of my nose.

What do they eat? Not the mice

in the walls. Not the ants

busy on their rush-hour freeways

from the sugar cannister

and the olive oil spill to the secret

tunnel world under the sink.

Not the sowbugs, wee armadillos

nibbling the geranium leaves.

Not the wasps sleeping in paper

lanterns under the eaves. The other

nine hundred thousand inhabitants of what

I foolishly call my house.