My Mother's Body (8 page)
I am a compiler of lists: 1 bag
fine cracked corn, 1 sunflower seeds.
Thin tomato seedlings in hotbed;
check dahlias for sprouting.
Write Kathy. Call Lou. Pay
oil bill. Decide about Montana.
I find withered lists in pockets
of raincoats, reminders to buy birthday
presents for lovers who wear those warm
sweaters now in other lives. And what
did I decide about Montana? To believe
or disbelieve in its existence?
To rise at five some morning and fly there?
A buried assent or denial rots beneath.
I confess too that sometimes when I am listing
what I must do on a Monday, I will put on
tasks already completed for the neat pleasure
of striking them out, checking them off.
What do these lists mean? That I mistrust my memory,
that my attention, a huge hungry crow
settling to carrion even on the highway
hates to rise and flap off, wants to continue
feasting on what it has let down upon
folding the tent of its broad dusty wings.
That I like to conquer chaos one square
at a time like a board game.
That I fear the sins of omission more
than commission. That the whining saw
of the mill of time shrieks always in my ears
as I am borne with all the other logs
forward to be dismantled and rebuilt
into chairs, into frogs, into running water.
All lists start where they halt, in intention.
Only the love that is work completes them.
The sky is white and the earth is white
and the white wind is blowing in arabesques
through us. The world wizens in the cold
to a circle that stops beyond my mittens
outstretched on which the white froth
still dissolves. Up, north, leftâ
all are obliterated in the swirl.
The only color that exists clings to
your face, your coat, your scarf.
We ride the feathered back of a white goose
that flies miles high over the Himalayas.
Where yesterday houses stood of neighbors,
summer people, scandals still smoulderingâ
heaps of old tires that burn for daysâ
today all is whited out, a mistake
on a typed page. My blood fizzes in my cheeks
like a shaken soda waiting to explode.
Into any haven we reach we will carry
a dizziness, a blindness that will melt
slowly, a sense of how uneasily we inhabit
this earth, how a rise or drop of a few degrees,
a little more water or a trifle less, renders
us strange as brontosaurus in our homeland.
We are fitted for a short winter and then spring.
We stagger out of the belly of the snow
plucked of words naked and steaming.
I keep cutting off bits of my fingers or banging
my knee hard. I am offering pain and blood
like a down payment on myself withheld.
Don't leave me because I am wasting words,
pissing them out like bad wine swallowed
that leaves the skull echoing and scraped.
Don't let the words rise up and leave me
like a flight of dissatisfied geese.
I am waters waiting to be troubled again.
I am coming back and I will enter quiet
like a cave and crouch with my knees drawn up
till you birth me into squabbling bliss.
I promise to relearn stillness like a spider.
I will apprentice myself to pine trees.
I will study the heron waiting on one foot.
Only do not leave me empty as the skin
the snake has cast on the path, ghostly
colors fading and the sinuous hunter gone.
Fill me roaring with your necessary music.
Loose upon me your stories screaming for life,
ravenous as gulls over a fishing boat.
Or send the little dreams like gnats into my hair.
Tease me with almost vision, flashes, scents
that dangle barbs into the dark currents
of memory. Use me however you will but
use me. These little accidents are offerings
to that Coming never accidental.
Apple blossom petals lay on asphalt
fallen from the tree at the road's turn
white as the flesh of the apple
will be, flushed pink
with the same blush
tender and curved as cheeks;
soft on hard; soon
to be bruised to vague stains.
Our best impulses often drop so
and vanish under traffic. We will
not know for months
if they bore fruit.
At times characters from my novels swarm through me,
children of my mind, and possess me as dybbuks.
My own shabby memories they have plucked and eaten
till sometimes I cannot remember my own sorrows.
In all that I value there is a core of mystery,
in the seed that wriggles its new roots into the soil
and whose pale head bursts the surface,
in the dance where our bodies merge and reassemble,
in the starving baby whose huge glazing eyes
burned into my bones, in the look that passes
between predator and prey before the death blow.
I know of what rags and bones and clippings
from frothing newsprint and poisonous glue
my structures are built. Yet these creatures
I have improvised like golem walk off and thrive.
Between one and two thirds of our lives we spend
in darkness, and the little lights we turn on
make little holes in that great thick rich void.
We are never done with knowing or with gnawing,
but under the saying is whispering, touching
and silence. Out of a given set of atoms
we cast and recast the holy patterns new.
Trellises bear the weight of roses,
pole beans, grape vines, wisteria,
yet a stake or posts with wires
strung between gives as good support.
They are expressions of pleasure,
garden jewelry, gestures
of proportion in the winter,
cascades of avid tangled greenery
in the full clamor of summer.
Benches under trees, cedar chairs
that overlook the tomatoes or the marsh
gradually ripening from green to sand
to bronze, a settee and table
on the grass, why do these furnishings
seem Victorian? We go out to play,
fiercely and with bats, with balls,
with rackets. We go out to bash our flesh
on the rough granite boulder of our will.
To sit among the shrubs and contemplate,
not for a tan, not for the body's
honing, oiling or toning, but just
to feed the eyes and scalded ears,
to let a gentle light into the brain,
to quiet the media babble, without radio,
Walkman, blast box, to let cool
the open hearth furnaces of ambition,
is to shape a space left open for calm
as if that harmony could shine down
like sunlight on the scalp. Perhaps
you say these little structures which contain
no real furniture, work or tools
are secret traps for catching silence.
Let outside and inside blur in the light season.
Build us pergolas, follies, arbors, terraces.
Let us make our gardens half artful
and half wild, to match our love.
Sleep, you jade smooth liar,
you promised to come
to me, come to me
waiting here like a cut
open melon ripe as summer.
Sleep, you black velvet
tomcat, where are you prowling?
I set a trap of sheets
clean and fresh as daisies,
pillows like cloudy sighs.
Sleep, you soft-bellied
angel with feathered thighs,
you tease my cheek with the brush
of your wings. I reach
for you but clutch air.
Sleep, you fur-bottomed tramp,
when I want you, you're in
everybody's bed but my own.
Take you for granted and you stalk
me from the low point of every hour.
Sleep, omnivorous billy goat,
you gobble the kittens, the crows,
the cop on duty, the fast horse,
but me you leave on the plate
like a cold shore dinner.
Is this divorce permanent?
Runneled with hope I lie down
nightly longing to pass
again under the fresh blessing
of your weight and broad wings.
I'm the only poet with the name.
Can you imagine a prima ballerina named
Marge? Marge Curie, Nobel Prize winner.
Empress Marge. My lady Marge? Rhymes with
large/charge/barge. Workingclass?
Definitely. Any attempt to doll it up
(Mar-gee? Mar-gette? Margelina?
Margarine?) makes it worse. Name
like an oilcan, like a bedroom
slipper, like a box of baking soda,
useful, plain; impossible for foreigners,
from French to Japanese, to pronounce.
My own grandmother called me what
could only be rendered in English
as Mousie. O my parents, what
you did unto me, forever. Even
my tombstone will look like a cartoon.
Up over the white shoulder of the dune
the sand that scorched our soles
now caresses our bare feet with cool compliance.
The foundry of the sun is shut down.
Where are the shallow caverns of shadow
carved into the blinding desert light?
Bowls of mist, pennons, traveling
ghosts. Finally the moon floats belly
up like a dead goldfish over the dune.
Tonight it could not get free
of the ocean wave but trails spume,
White as salt, it seems to be dissolving.
But it leers oddly. A tipsy moon
wobbling, wavering over the sand
as if it can't find the way up.
O drunken moon, you see too much
peering down: mugging, stabbing, rape,
the weak slipping into death,
the abandoned raking the ceiling
with the sharp claws of hunger.
You watch lovers in every hamlet,
in beds, in cars, in hammocks.
You cross the cranky Atlantic
and stuck up in the sky and lonely
what do you see first but couples
coupling on the Great Beach, among
the shiny poison ivy leaves
of the gentle slopes and sand tracks.
No wonder you drink yourself tipsy
on salt wine and go staggering now
faded and crooked, still lecherous.
We all await the blackberries,
stealthy as foxes, stopping by
in August disguised as
joggers, tourists, birdwatchers.
They begin hard and green,
baby hand-grenades. Slowly
they blush. The red
empurples like aging wine.
The day they first glint
with jet-bead shininess
somebody pounces. Losers
pick only the moldy and green.
Blackberrying: the tiger
hunting of scavenging.
Tonight even before I take
the pie from the oven,
its crisp lattice steaming,
my neighbor accuses, waving
her fork like a weapon,
You got blackberries today.
My arms are scored
as if by a lover too much
in a hurry to bother
with zippers and gentle tugs.
Smug after a successful
raid, I hold out arms
etched with hieroglyphs.
My mouth is purple inside.
Blueberries are gentle.
We squat among the bushes,
picking, picking, picking.
Only tedium limits our haul.
With each berry in its season
We wait to catch the very day
its flavor petal by petal
opens fully at last like a rose.
Light sharpens on the leaves
of cotoneaster, just as it sparks
off running water, shards of glitter
ticking the eyes glad. As I go down,
go down from the house, till it sinks
setting behind the hill, even in pine
woods the sun is hot to the bare sole
on the white sand path. Resin
thickens the air, invisible smoke.
Here I am at peace eating handfuls
of tart blueberries touched with bloom
as the morning was coated with fog
and huckleberries shiny and black
as the last moonless night. Here I laze
feeling the sun ripening my blood
sweet as the tomatoes near the house
in air that smells like air,
by water that tastes of water.
The crimson and fragrant musk roses,
the sweetest juicy blackberries,
rake the arms with their brambles,
slash the calves, but the small thorn
that slides into the skin covertly
unmarked by a bubble of blood
causes the real trouble
as the skin closes over
and its thin red line of infection
steals toward the heart.
Go to the ocean and throw the crumbs in,
all that remains of seven years.
When you wept, didn't I taste your tears
on my cheek, give you bread for salt?
Here where I sing at full pitch
and volume uncensored, I was attacked.
The pale sister nibbled like a mouse
in the closets with sharp pointy teeth.
She let herself in with her own key.
My trust garlanded her round. Indeed
it was convenient to trust her
while she wasted paper thin with envy.
Here she coveted. Here she crept.
Here her cold fluttering hands lingered
on secrets and dipped into the honey.
Her shadow fell on the contents of every drawer.
Alone in the house she made love
to herself in the mirror wearing
stolen gowns; then she carried them home
for their magic to color her life.
Little losses spread like tooth decay.
Furtive betrayals festered, cysts
hidden in flesh. Her greed swelled
in the dark, its hunger always roaring.
No number of gifts could silence
those cries of resentful hunger,
not for the baubles, the scarves,
the blouses she stole, but to be twenty
and pretty again, not to have to work
to live but merely to be blond and thin
and let men happen like rain in the night
and never to wake alone.
On the new year my grandmother Hannah
told me to carry crumbs to the water
and cast them out. We are tossing
away the trust that was too convenient
and we are throwing evil from the house
the rancid taint of envy spoiling the food
the pricing fingers of envy rumpling the cloth
the secret ill-wisher chewing from inside
the heart's red apple to rot it out.
I cast away my anger like spoiled milk.
Let the salty wind air the house and cleanse
the stain of betrayal from the new year.