My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy Page B

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,
    but before the diet of thin gruel sun,
    the winter putting it to us like a big
    hard grey boot in the gut,
    the storms that shovel us into their pit,
    the snow that comes down like lace
    and hardens to sludge in the gears:
    A chance to be somebody else
    before cabin fever turns you inside out
    and counts your last resource
    down to its copper head.
    We dress like death whose time
    of ascendance comes with the long
    nights when the white moon freezes
    on the snow and the fox hunts late,
    his tail bannering, kill or starve.
    I like the grinning pumpkinhead,
    the skeleton mocking what will scatter it,
    that puts on the face of its fears
    and rollicks on the dead leaves
    in the yard whooping and yowling.
    Tonight you run in the streets,
    brave because you wear a mask;
    vampires do not worry about rape.
    Witches wander the night like cats.
    We bribe other people’s children
    with sweets not to attack us.
    We put on sheets and cut eyeholes
    although we all know that when ghosts
    come, they wear their old clothes
    and stand suddenly in the hall
    looking for a boot or muse at the window
    or speak abruptly out of their own
    unused and unusable passion.
    For my true dead I say kaddish
    and light the yartzeit candle.
    No, tonight it is our own mortality
    we mock with cartoon grimace,
    our own bones we peel to, dancing,
    our own end we celebrate.
    Long night of sugar and skull
    when we put on death’s clothes
    and play act it like children.

Unbuttoning
    The buttons lie jumbled in a tin
    that once held good lapsang souchong
    tea from China, smoky as the smell
    from a wood stove 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 practical but better
    able than fading snapshots
    to conjure buried seasons.
    Button stamped with an anchor
    means my late grade-school pea coat.
    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:
    â€œWatch the clipper ships take off
    for Europe. Soon war will come to us.
    â€œThey 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