My Mother's Body Read Free Page B

sing in my mind like wine. What you
    did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

THE CHUPPAH
    Dedicated to Rabbi Debra Hachen
,
who made a beautiful wedding with us
,
for which many of the poems in this section were written
.
Two poems by Ira Wood are included
.

Witnessing a wedding
    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.

Touch tones
    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.

The place where everything changed
    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.

What Makes It Good?
    What makes it good
    Is that we came to this
    Having each tasted freely
    Of the sweet plum flesh of others.
    So your head will not turn?
    It may turn.
    But my feet won’t follow.
    What makes it