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.