by Marge Piercy
we burn the calf, we burn the peach,
we burn the wine.
Life is a burning, and what we burn
is ourselves. Observe the back begin
to curl, to bow like a paper match
consumed, and the dark hair powdering
to grey ashes.
You are all we cannot live with
or without. You warm and you spoil,
you heat and you kill. Like us
whatever you touch, you seize for your use
and use up.
from
My Mother’s Body
Putting the good things away
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 schmattehs
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 clothes 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.
They inhabit me
I am pregnant with certain deaths
of women who choked before they
could speak their names
could know their names
before they had names to know.
I am owl, the spirit said,
I swim through the darkness on wide wings.
I see what is behind me
as well as what is before.
In the morning a splash of blood
on the snow marks where I found
what I needed. In the mild
light of day the crows mob
me, cursing. Are you the daughter
of my amber clock-tower eyes?
I am pregnant with certain deaths
of women whose hands were replaced
by paper flowers, which must be kept
clean, which could tear on a glance,
which could not hold even water.
I am cat. I rub your prejudices
against the comfortable way they grow.
I am fastidious, not as a careful
housewife, but as a careful lover,
keeping genitals as clean as face.
I turn up my belly of warm sensuality
to your fingers, purring my pleasure
and letting my claws just tip out.
Are you the daughter of the fierce
aria of my passion scrawled on the night?
I am pregnant with certain deaths
of women who dreamed that the lover
would strike like lightning and throw
them over the saddle and carry them off.
It was the ambulance that came.
I am wolf. I call across the miles
my messages of yearning and hunger,
and the snow speaks to me constantly
of food and want and friend and foe.
The iron air is heavy with ice
tweaking my nose and the sound
of the wind is sharp and whetted.
Commenting, chatting, calling,
we run through the net of scents
querying, Are you my daughter?
I am pregnant with deaths of certain
women who curled, wound in the skeins
of dream, who secreted silk
from spittle and bound themselves
in swaddling clothes of shrouds.
I am raccoon. I thrive in woods,
I thrive in the alleys of your cities.
With my little hands I open
whatever you shut away from me.
On your garbage I grow glossy.
Among packs of stray dogs I bare
my teeth, and the warring rats part.
I flourish like the ailanthus tree;
in your trashheaps I dig underground
castles. Are you my daughter?
I am pregnant with certain deaths
of women who wander slamming doors
and sighing as if to be overheard,
talking to themselves like water left
running, tears dried to table salt.
They hide in my hair like crabs,
they are banging on the nodes of my spine
as on the door of a tardy elevator.
They want to ride up to the observation
platform and peer out my eyes for the view.
All this wanting creates a black hole
where ghosts and totems whirl and join
passing through into antimatter of art,
the alternate universe in which such certain
deaths as theirs and mine throb with light.
Unbuttoning
The buttons lie jumbled in a tin
that once held good lapsang souchong
tea from China, smoky as the smell
from a woodstove 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 p
ractical but better
able than fading snapshots
to conjure buried seasons.
Button stamped with an anchor
means my grade-school peacoat.
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.
Out of the rubbish
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 receeding vista opens
of working-class making do:
the dress that becomes
a blouse that becomes
a dolldress, 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 rem-
nants were first old.
A three-inch birchbark
canoe labelled Muskegon,
small wooden shoes, souvenirs
of Holland, Michigan,
an ashtray from the Blue Hole
reputed bottomless.
Look out the window
at the sulfur 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 it primrose.
Paint it turquoise, lime.
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.
My mother’s body
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 chanukkiyah
candles that burn so fast, weeping
veils of wax down the hanukiyah.
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, Shin 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.
2.
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.
3.
What is this mask of skin we wear,
what is this dress of flesh,
this coat of few colors and little ha
ir?
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
those major muscles by which we walk
and walk and walk over the hard 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,
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.
4.
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?
