My Mother's Body
Marge Piercy
Also by Marge Piercy
Poetry
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water (Selected Poems)
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Novels
Three Women
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
Other
Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and the Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood)
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology
The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1977, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 by Marge Piercy
“What Makes It Good?” and “We Come Together” copyright © 1985 by Ira Wood, reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Some of these poems were previously published in Barnwood, Bits Press, Cedar Rock, Croton Review, Images, Jam To-Day, Kalliope, Manhattan Poetry Review, Mudfish, Negative Capability, Open Places, Poem the Nukes, Raccoon, Speculative Poetry Review, Star Line, Tarasque, Thirteenth Moon, and Woman of Power.
“The Chuppah” first appeared in Lilith, the independent Jewish women’s magazine, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, © copyright Lilith Publication, Inc., 1983. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Piercy, Marge. My mother’s body. I. Title.
PS3566.14M9 1985 811′.54 84-48661
eISBN: 978-0-307-76139-2
v3.1
In Memory of my Mother
Bert Bernice Bunnin Piercy
and for my husband
Ira Wood
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
WHAT REMAINS
They inhabit me
The Annuity
Waking one afternoon in my best dress
Out of the rubbish
Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing
Unbuttoning
The sun and the moon in the morning sky of Charlotte
Putting the good things away
The Crunch
What remains
My mother’s body
THE CHUPPAH
Witnessing a wedding
Touch tones
The place where everything changed
What Makes It Good?
Why marry at all?
We Come Together
Every leaf is a mouth
The Wine
The Chuppah
How we make nice
House-keeping
Return of the prodigal darling
Down
House built of breath
The infidelity of sleep
Nailing up the mezuzah
CHIAROSCURO
The good go down
Homage to Lucille, Dr. Lord-Heinstein
Where is my half-used tube of Tom’s fennel toothpaste tonight?
Your cats are your children
Mr. Big
The maternal instinct at work
Magic mama
Nothing more will happen
Blue Tuesday in August
The Disinherited
Cold head, cold heart
Deferral
Breaking out
Paper birds
Listening to a speech
Making a will
Still life
From HoJo’s to Mr. Softee
The longings of women
Out of sight
Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?
UNDERRATED PLEASURES
Building is taming
Cowering in a corner
The Listmaker
Going into town in the storm
The clumsy season
Silk confetti
And whose creature am I?
In praise of gazebos
The Faithless
If I had been called Sabrina or Ann, she said
The night the moon got drunk
Sweet ambush
The high arch of summer
What we fail to notice
Tashlich
This small and intimate place
How grey, how wet, how cold
Deer couchant
Peaches in November
Six underrated pleasures
1. Folding sheets
2. Picking pole beans
3. Taking a hot bath
4. Sleeping with cats
5. Planting bulbs
6. Canning
A Note About the Author
WHAT REMAINS
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.
The Annuity
1.
When I was fifteen we moved
from a tight asbestos shoebox
to a loose drafty two-story house,
my own tiny room prized under the eaves.
My privacy formed like a bud from the wood.
In my pale green womb I scribbled
evolving from worm to feral cat,
gobbling books, secreting bones,
building a spine one segment
at a time out of Marx and Freud.
Across the hall the roomers lived,
the couple from Appalachia who cooked
bacon in their room. At a picnic
she miscarried. I held her
in foaming blood. Lost twins.
Salesmen, drab, dirty in the bathroom,
solitary, with girly magazines,
detective stories and pads of orders,
invoices, reports that I would inherit
to write my poems on;
overgrown boys dogging you
out to the backyard with the laundry
baskets; middle-aged losers with eyes
that crawled under my clothes
like fleas and made me itch;
those who paid on time and those
with excuses breaking out like pimples
at the end of the month.
I slammed my door and left them,
ants on the dusty plain.
For the next twenty years
you toted laundry down two flights,
cleaned their bathroom every morning,
scrubbed at the butt burns,
sponged up the acid of their complaints
read their palms and gave common
sense advice, fielded their girlfriends,
commiserated with their ex-wives,
lied to their creditors, brewed
tisanes and told them to eat fruit.
What did you do with their checks?
Buy yourself dresses, candy, leisure?
You saved, waiting for the next depression.
You salted it away and Father took control,
investing and then spending as he chose.
2.
Months before you died, you had us drive
south to Florida because you insisted
you wanted to give me things I must carry back.
What were they? Some photographs, china
animals my brother had brought home from
World War II, a set of silverplate.
Then the last evening while Father watched
a game show, you began pulling out dollar
bills, saying Shush, don’t let him
see, don’t let him know. A five-dollar
bill stuffed under the bobbypins,
ten dollars furled in an umbrella,
wads of singles in the bottom of closet
dividers full of clothes. You shoved
them in my hands, into my purse,
you thrust them at Woody and me.
Take, you kept saying, I want you to have
it, now while I can, take.
That night in the hotel room
we sat on the floor counting money
as if we had robbed a candy store:
eighteen hundred in nothing larger
than a twenty, squirreled away, saved
I can’t stand to imagine how.
That was the gift you had that felt
so immense to you we would need a car
to haul it back, maybe a trailer too,
the labor of your small deceit
that you might give me an inheritance,
that limp wad salvaged from your sweat.
Waking one afternoon in my best dress
Until I tasted the blood spurt in my mouth
bursting its sour clots, and the air
forced my bucking lungs and I choked,
I did not know I had been dead.
The lint of voices consulting over me.
Didn’t I leave myself to them,
an inheritance of sugared almond memories,
wedding cake slabs drying in their heads?
They carried me home and they ate me,
angel fluff with icing.
Now I return coiling and striking
on the slippery deck of dawn like a water
snake caught in a net, all fangs
and scales and slime and lashing tail.
I have crawled up from dankness
spitting headstones like broken teeth.
My breath spoils milk. My eyes
shine red as Antares in the scorpion’s tail
and my touch sticks like mud.
I have been nothing
who now put on my body like an apron
facing a sink of greasy dishes.
Right here pain welded my ribs, here
my heart still smokes. My life hangs triggered
ready to trap me if I raise a hand.
Dresses flap and flutter about me
while my bones whistle
and my flesh rusts neuter as iron.
The rooms of my life wait
to pack me in boxes.
My eyes bleed. My eardrums
are pierced with a hot wire of singing
that only crows and hawks could harmonize.
My best dress splits from neck to hem.
Howling I trot for the brushlands with yellow
teeth blinking, hair growing out like ragweed
and new claws clicking on stone
that I must wear dull
before I can bear again
the smell of kitchens
the smell of love.
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 receding vista opens
of workingclass making do:
the dress that becomes
a blouse that becomes
a doll dress, 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 remnants
were first old.
A three-inch birch-bark
canoe labeled Muskegon,
little wooden shoes
souvenirs of Holland, Mich.,
an ashtray from the Blue Hole,
reputed bottomless.
Look out the window
at the sulphur 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 the wall lime.
Paint it turquoise, primrose.
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.
Of pumpkins and ghosts I sing
Our Mardi Gras is this, not before
a season of fasting dictated once
by the bare cupboard of late winter,
