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horror—all
    mimed with reckless energy, to astound and delight me.
Her Creed
    I believe
    in the creation of
    the criminal,
    the evil people,
    my mother says on her eighty-third birthday,
    everyone born is a miracle.
    How did I know I would have YOU,
she
    cries out. “I don’t know what I would have done
    without you, Mom,” I say, “I’d still
    be out there, calling MA-ma, MA-ma!”
    She laughs with delight. But she’s worried about cloning—
    “When they clone
you,
Mom,” I tell her,
    “I want one.”
I’ll put you on the list,
she says.
    “I want the little kind, that I can
    put in a high chair and feed Cream of Wheat to,”
    I add, and she says,
I’ll move your name
    up high on the list.
Over and over,
    these days, she tells me they never will be able
    to assemble real flesh, in a dish, not flesh
    with spirit—the men cannot make happen
    what happened in her body. When she dies, she wants to see
    her father again, and put her arms
    around her second husband.
Not a living
    cell with a soul. Oh—but Science,
    she sighs,
you know
—20,000
    Leagues Under the Sea
!
“Let’s come back
    and check on them,” I propose. “On your birthday,
    in the year 3000, I’ll pick you up,
    and we’ll visit this planet.”
What will you be driving?
    she asks. “A goose,” I tell my mother.
    “I’ll honk.”
Shave and a haircut,
she says.
    They will never make flesh.
5.
Warily, Sportsman!
    Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk …
    it seems mine,
    Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and
    sluggish, my tap is death.
    —“The Sleepers,” Walt Whitman
    When she talks about caring for her beloved husband
    after his stroke, I hold the phone
    in the crook of my shoulder, where the heads of sleeping
    infants have rested. She goes over the heartaches
    again, the setbacks, the bad nurse—
    the one who was not professional,
    who did not understand he was not
    responsible for the things he said about her
    race and about her neighborhood.
    Suddenly, my mother bursts out,
    And my therapist says it COULDN’T have been my
    kicking him, the night before,
    that caused the stroke.
“Of course not,”
    I say, “of course not. You, uh,
    kicked him?”
He was sitting on the couch,
    we were fighting about which cruise to take next, I could
    TELL how small the staterooms were
    by the plan of the windows, but HE wanted to go
    to RUSSIA, I kicked him in the shin with my soft
    sneaker. And my doctor says that it had NOTHING
    to do with the stroke or the cancer.
I agree,
    but a week later I stop short
    on the street: my mother is still hitting and kicking people?
    I know that soft sneaker. But when
    she married again, I thought she’d stop hitting.
    Or do people hit and kick each other
    a lot, does everyone do it? Does each
    family have its lineage
    of pugilists? No one hit her back
    until today—by-blow of this page,
    coldcock to her little forehead.
6. Little End Ode
    When I told my mother the joke—the new kid
    at college who asked where the library’s at,
    and the sophomore who said, “At Yale, we do not
    end our sentences with prep-
    ositions,” whereupon the frosh said, “Oh,
    I beg your pardon, where’s the library
    at, asshole”—she shrieked with delight.
    Asshole,
she murmured fondly. She’s become
    so fresh, rinsed with sweetness, as if she is
    music, the strings especially high and bright.
    She says it and sighs with contentment, as if she has
    finally talked back to her own mother.
    Or maybe it is the closest she has come,
    for a while, to the rich, animal life
    she lived with her second husband—now
    I can see that of course she touched him everywhere,
    as lovers do. She touched me there,
    you know, courteously, with oil
    like myrrh; soon after she had given me life
    she gave me pleasure, which gave her pleasure,
    maybe it felt to her fingertip like the
    complex, clean knot of her Fire Girls
    tie-clasp. She seems, these days, like a very
    human goddess. I do not want her
    to die. This feels like