My mother’s body

Marge Piercy

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 hawkfaced 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 chanukiya.

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 dreydl

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 dollbaby,

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 that I might 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.

541

Rating:

Comment form:

Similar Poems:

Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,