My Mother's Body Read Free Page A

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 doll baby,
    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 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.
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?
    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