Read Online My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy - Free Book Online Page B

whom.
    Sleeping together is a euphemism
    for people but tantamount
    to marriage for cats.
    Mammals together we snuggle
    and snore through the cold nights
    while the stars swing round
    the pole and the great horned
    owl hunts for flesh like ours.
5. Planting bulbs
    No task could be easier.
    Just dig the narrow hole,
    drop in the handful of bone
    meal and place the bulb
    like a swollen brown garlic
    clove full of hidden resources.
    Their skin is the paper
    of brown bags. The smooth
    pale flesh peeks through.
    Three times its height
    is its depth, a parable
    against hard straining.
    The art is imagining
    the spring landscape poking
    through chrysanthemum, falling
    leaves, withered brown lushness
    of summer. The lines drawn
    now, the colors mixed
    will pop out of the soil
    after the snow sinks from sight
    into it. The circles,
    the casual grace of tossed handfuls,
    the soldierly rows will stand,
    the colors sing sweet or sour.
    When the first sharp ears
    poke out, you are again
    more audience than actor,
    as if someone said, Close
    your eyes and draw a picture.
    Now open them and look.
6. Canning
    We pour a mild drink each,
    turn on the record player,
    Beethoven perhaps or Vivaldi,
    opera sometimes, and then together
    in the steamy kitchen we put up
    tomatoes, peaches, grapes, pears.
    Each fruit has a different
    ritual: popping the grapes
    out of the skins like little
    eyeballs, slipping the fuzz
    from the peaches and seeing
    the blush painted on the flesh beneath.
    It is part game: What shall
    we magic wand this into?
    Peach conserve, chutney, jam,
    brandied peaches. Tomatoes
    turn juice, sauce hot or mild
    or spicy, canned, ketchup.
    Vinegars, brandies, treats
    for the winter: pleasure
    deferred. Canning is thrift
    itself in sensual form,
    surplus made beautiful, light
    and heat caught in a jar.
    I find my mother sometimes
    issuing from the steam, aproned,
    red faced, her hair up in a net.
    Since her death we meet usually
    in garden or kitchen. Ghosts
    come reliably to savors, I learn.
    In the garden your ashes,
    in the kitchen your knowledge.
    Little enough we can save
    from the furnace of the sun
    while the bones grow brittle as paper
    and the hair itself turns ashen.
    But what we can put by, we do
    with gaiety and invention
    while the music laps round us
    like dancing light, but Mother,
    this pleasure is only deferred.
    We eat it all before it spoils.

A note about the author
    Marge Piercy is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including
Colors Passing Through Us; The Art of Blessing the Day; Early Grrrl; What Are Big Girls Made Of?; Mars and Her Children; The Moon Is Always Female;
her selected poems
Circles on the Water; Stone, Paper, Knife;
and
My Mother’s Body
. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. Her book of craft essays,
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt
, is part of the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press. She is also the author of fifteen novels and, most recently, a memoir entitled
Sleeping with Cats
. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.
    Marge Piercy’s Web site address is www.margepiercy.com .