My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy Page A

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