Read My Mother's Body for Free Online Page A

trampoline.
    Beside the drive the ruffs of Queen Anne’s lace
    are host to the striped caterpillar
    that probes with its roan horns.
    Dry as the white dunes under sunlight, the day
    smells of cut curing grasses beige as Siamese cats.
    The cicadas like little chainsaws inflame the air.
    All things bear sharp corners of a pane of glass.
    What a clean unused day to walk all over.
    On such a morning I can almost believe
    something blue and green and yellow
    may survive us after we explode
    and burn the sky down.
    Some shoot may sprout and grow.

The Disinherited
    We do not inherit the world from our parents
,
    we borrow it from our children
.                    
    Gandhi
    The dreams of the children
    reek of char and ashes.
    The fears of the children
    peer out through the brown eyes
    of a calf tethered away from its mother,
    a calf who bawls for the unknown
    bad thing about to happen
    as the butcher’s truck arrives.
    The children finger their own sharp
    bones in their wrists.
    They knead their foreheads gingerly.
    Last night I dreamed Mother was burning,
    the little girl said in class,
    my father, my dog, my brother,
    fire was eating them all.
    I wrote three postcards to the President.
    I won’t be anything when I grow up,
    the boy said, I won’t live that long.
    I don’t like firecrackers anymore.
    I always draw houses falling.
    Blood seeps from the roof of the cave
    of their minds, fear becoming rock.
    In their dreams there is one great
    loud noise. Then weeping. Then silence.

Cold head, cold heart
    I suppose no one has ever died of a head cold
    while not fearing or fervently
    wishing to do so on the hour,
    gasping through a nose the size of Detroit.
    My mouth tastes of moldy sneaker.
    My tongue is big as a liverwurst.
    My throat steams like a sewer.
    The gnome of snot has stuck a bicycle pump in my ear.
    I am a quagmire, a slithy bog.
    I exude effluvia, mumbled curses,
    and a dropsy of wads of paper,
    handkerchiefs like little leprosies.
    The world is an irritant
    full of friends jumping in noisy frolic.
    The damned healthy: I breathe on them.
    My germs are my only comfort.

Deferral
    You’ll do it, what you really want.
    You’ll start counting, you’ll
    feel everything direct as rain
    on your skin in mild May twilight.
    You’ll start chewing every moment
    like fresh corn on the cob hot
    buttered and actually enjoy it
    as soon as you grow up, leave home,
    after you’ve got your diploma,
    when you’ve passed your orals,
    when you finish psychoanalysis,
    as soon as you meet the one woman for you,
    when Mr. Right comes charging along,
    after you pay off the mortgage,
    as soon as the children are in school,
    when you finally get the divorce,
    after the children finish college,
    when you’re promoted as you deserve,
    when you’re a complete success at last,
    after you retire to Florida,
    when you die and go to heaven.
    You’ll have considerable practice
    at being dead by then.

Breaking out
    My first political act? I am seeing
    two doors that usually stood open,
    leaning together like gossips, making
    a closet of their corner.
    A mangle stood there, for ironing
    what I never thought needed it:
    sheets, towels, my father’s underwear;
    an upright vacuum with its stuffed
    sausage bag that deflated with a gusty
    sigh as if weary of housework as I,
    who swore I would never dust or sweep
    after I left home, who hated
    to see my mother removing daily
    the sludge the air lay down like a snail’s track
    so that when in school I read of Sisyphus
    and his rock, it was her I
    thought of, housewife scrubbing
    on raw knees as the factories rained ash.
    Nasty stork king of the hobnobbing
    doors was a wooden yardstick dusty
    with chalk marks from hems’ rise and fall.
    When I had been judged truly wicked
    that stick was the tool of punishment.
    I was beaten as I bellowed like a locomotive
    as if noise could ward off