My Mother's Body (3 page)

Like the cat the doberman has trapped,

like the rabbit in the fox's jaws

we feel the splintering of our bones

and wait for the moment that still may flash

the white space between pains

when we can break free.

It is the moment of damage

when already the pricing mind

tries to estimate cost and odds

while the nerves lean on their sirens

but the spine sounds a quiet tone

of command toward a tunnel of moment

that drills the air toward escape

or death. I have been caught.

Biology is destiny for all alive

but at the instant of tearing

open or free, the blood shrieks and

all my mother's mothers groan.

These ashes are not the fine dust I imagined.

The undertaker brings them out from the back

in a plastic baggie, like supermarket produce.

I try not to grab, but my need shocks me,

how I hunger to seize this officially

labeled garbage and carry you off.

All the water was vaporized,

the tears, the blood, the sweat,

fluids of a juicy, steamy woman

burnt offering into the humid Florida

air among cement palm trees with brown

fronds stuck up top like feather dusters.

In the wind the palmettoes clatter.

The air is yellowed with dust.

I carry you back North where you belong

through the bumpy black December night

on the almost empty plane stopping

at every airport like a dog at posts.

Now I hold what is left in my hands

bone bits, segments of the arched skull

varicolored stones of the body,

green, copper, beige, black, purple

fragments of shells eroded by storm

that slowly color the beach.

Archeology in a plastic baggie.

Grit spills into my palms:

reconstruct your days, your odyssey.

These are fragments of a smashed mosaic

that formed the face of a dancer

with bound feet, cursing in dreams.

At the marriage of the cat and dog

I howl under the floor.

You will chew on each other's bones

for years. You cannot read

the other's body language.

On the same diet you starve.

My longest, oldest love, I have brought

you home to the land I am dug into.

I promise a path laid right to you,

roses to spring from you, herbs nearby,

the company of my dead cats

whose language you already know.

We'll make your grave by piney woods,

a fine place to sit and sip wine,

to take the sun and watch the beans

grow, the tomatoes swell and redden.

You will smell rosemary, thyme,

and the small birds will come.

I promise to hold you in the mind

as a cupped hand protects a flame.

That is nothing to you. You cannot

hear. Yet just as I knew when you

really died, you know I have brought

you home. Now you want to be roses.

The dark socket of the year

the pit, the cave where the sun lies down

and threatens never to rise,

when despair descends softly as the snow

covering all paths and choking roads:

then hawk-faced pain seized you

threw you so you fell with a sharp

cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.

My father heard the crash but paid

no mind, napping after lunch,

yet fifteen hundred miles north

I heard and dropped a dish.

Your pain sunk talons in my skull

and crouched there cawing, heavy

as a great vessel filled with water,

oil or blood, till suddenly next day

the weight lifted and I knew your mind

had guttered out like the Chanukah

candles that burn so fast, weeping

veils of wax down the chanukiyot.

Those candles were laid out,

friends invited, ingredients bought

for latkes and apple pancakes,

that holiday for liberation

and the winter solstice

when tops turn like little planets.

Shall you have all or nothing

take half or pass by untouched?

Nothing you got,
Nun
said the dreidl

as the room stopped spinning.

The angel folded you up like laundry

your body thin as an empty dress.

Your clothes were curtains

hanging on the window of what had

been your flesh and now was glass.

Outside in Florida shopping plazas

loudspeakers blared Christmas carols

and palm trees were decked with blinking

lights. Except by the tourist

hotels, the beaches were empty.

Pelicans with pregnant pouches

flapped overhead like pterodactyls.

In my mind I felt you die.

First the pain lifted and then

you flickered and went out.

I walk through the rooms of memory.

Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,

every chair ghostly and muted.

Other times memory lights up from within

bustling scenes acted just the other side

of a scrim through which surely I could reach

my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain

of time which is and isn't and will be

the stuff of which we're made and unmade.

In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen,

your first nasty marriage just annulled,

thin from your abortion, clutching a book

against your cheek and trying to look

older, trying to look middle class,

trying for a job at Wanamaker's,

dressing for parties in cast-off

stage costumes of your sisters'. Your eyes

were hazy with dreams. You did not

notice me waving as you wandered

past and I saw your slip was showing.

You stood still while I fixed your clothes,

as if I were your mother. Remember me

combing your springy black hair, ringlets

that seemed metallic, glittering;

remember me dressing you, my seventy-year-

old mother who was my last doll baby,

giving you too late what your youth had wanted.

What is this mask of skin we wear,

what is this dress of flesh,

this coat of few colors and little hair?

This voluptuous seething heap of desires

and fears, squeaking mice turned up

in a steaming haystack with their babies?

This coat has been handed down, an heirloom,

this coat of black hair and ample flesh,

this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.

This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks,

they provided cushioning for my grandmother

Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me

and we all sat on them in turn, those major

muscles on which we walk and walk and walk

over the earth in search of peace and plenty.

My mother is my mirror and I am hers.

What do we see? Our face grown young again,

our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.

Our arms quivering with fat, eyes

set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,

our belly seamed with childbearing.

Give me your dress so I can try it on.

Oh it will not fit you, Mother, you are too fat.

I will not fit you, Mother.

I will not be the bride you can dress,

the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,

a dog's leather bone to sharpen your teeth.

You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.

Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks

barbed and drawing blood with their caress.

My twin, my sister, my lost love,

I carry you in me like an embryo

as once you carried me.

What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?

Did I truly think you could put me back inside?

Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten

furnace and be recast, that I would become you?

What did you fear in me, the child who wore

your hair, the woman who let that black hair

grow long as a banner of darkness, when you

a proper flapper wore yours cropped?

You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery

flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.

Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.

Secretly the bones formed in the bread.

I became willful, private as a cat.

You never knew what alleys I had wandered.

You called me bad and I posed like a gutter

queen in a dress sewn of knives.

All I feared was being stuck in a box

with a lid. A good woman appeared to me

indistinguishable from a dead one

except that she worked all the time.

Your payday never came. Your dreams ran

with bright colors like Mexican cottons

that bled onto the drab sheets of the day

and would not bleach with scrubbing.

My dear, what you said was one thing

but what you sang was another, sweetly

subversive and dark as blackberries,

and I became the daughter of your dream.

This body is your body, ashes now

and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,

my throat, my thighs. You run in me

a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,

you sing in my mind like wine. What you

did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

Slowly and slower you have learned

to let yourselves grow while weaving

through each other in strong cloth.

It is not strangeness in the mate

you must fear, and not the fear

that loosens us so we lean back

chilly with a sudden draft on flesh

recently joined and taste again

the other sharp as tin in the mouth,

but familiarity we must mistrust,

the word based on the family

that fogs the sight and plugs the nose.

Fills the ears with the wax of possession.

Toughens the daily dead skin

callused against penetration.

Never think you know finally, or say

My husband likes, My wife is,

without balancing in the coil of the inner ear

that no one is surely anything till dead.

Love without respect is cold as a boa

constrictor, its caresses as choking.

Celebrate your differences in bed.

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

Ah strange new beasties with strawberry hides,

velvet green antlers, undulant necks,

tentacles, wings and the senses of bees,

your own changing mosaic of face

and the face of the stranger you live with

and try to love, who enters your body

like water, like pain, like food.

We learn each other in braille,

what the tongue and teeth taste,

what the fingers trace, translate

into arias of knowledge and delight

of silk and stubble, of bark

and velvet and wet roses,

warbling colors that splash through

bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,

the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor

of resin, the voice that later

comes unbidden as a Mozart horn

concerto circling in the ears.

You are translated from label,

politic mask, accomplished patter,

to the hands round hefting,

to a weight, a thrust, a scent

sharp as walking in early

morning a path through a meadow

where a fox has been last night

and something in the genes saying

FOX to that rich ruddy smell.

The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth

can speak a name in runes. Absent,

your presence carols in the blood.

Great love is an abrupt switching

in a life bearing along at express speeds

expecting to reach the designated stations

at the minute listed in the timetable.

Great love can cause derailment,

coaches upended, people screaming,

luggage strewn over the mountainside,

blood and paper on the grass.

It's months before the repairs are done,

everyone discharged from the hospital,

all the lawsuits settled, damage

paid for, the scandal subsided.

Then we get on with the journey

in some new direction, hiking overland

with camels, mules, via helicopter

by barge through canals.

The maps are all redrawn and what

was north is east of south

and there be dragons in those mountains

and the sun shines warmer and hairier

and the moon has a cat's face.

There is more sunshine. More rain.

The seasons are marked and intense.

We seldom catch colds.

There is always you at my back

ready to fight when I must fight;

there is always you at my side

the words flashing light and shadow.

What was grey ripples scarlet and golden;

what was bland reeks of ginger and brandy;

what was empty roars like a packed stadium;

what slept gallops for miles.

Even our bones are reformed in the close

night when we hold each other's dreams.

Memories uncoil backward and are remade.

Now the first egg itself is freshly twinned.

We build daily houses brick by brick.

We put each other up at night like tents.

This story tells itself as it grows.

Each morning we give birth to one another.