The Uses of Sorrow

Someone I loved gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

Mary Oliver

Morbidity and Doubt

fragility is

excruciating

me

into

extinction

reality

checking

me

broken

til

death

do

us

part

The bout of reaching out

requires a reaching in

a wrenching without

an in or an out

inside of endless doubt

My Mother's Body

1.

The dark socket of the year

the pit, the cave where the sun lies down

and threatens never to rise,

when despair descends softly as the snow

covering all paths and choking roads:

then hawkfaced pain seized you

threw you so you fell with a sharp

cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.

My father heard the crash but paid

no mind, napping after lunch

yet fifteen hundred miles north

I heard and dropped a dish.

Your pain sunk talons in my skull

and crouched there cawing, heavy

as a great vessel filled with water,

oil or blood, till suddenly next day

the weight lifted and I knew your mind

had guttered out like the Chanukah

candles that burn so fast, weeping

veils of wax down the chanukiya.

Those candles were laid out,

friends invited, ingredients bought

for latkes and apple pancakes,

that holiday for liberation

and the winter solstice

when tops turn like little planets.

Shall you have all or nothing

take half or pass by untouched?

Nothing you got, Nun said the dreydl

as the room stopped spinning.

The angel folded you up like laundry

your body thin as an empty dress.

Your clothes were curtains

hanging on the window of what had

been your flesh and now was glass.

Outside in Florida shopping plazas

loudspeakers blared Christmas carols

and palm trees were decked with blinking

lights. Except by the tourist

hotels, the beaches were empty.

Pelicans with pregnant pouches

flapped overhead like pterodactyls.

In my mind I felt you die.

First the pain lifted and then

you flickered and went out.

2.

I walk through the rooms of memory.

Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,

every chair ghostly and muted.

Other times memory lights up from within

bustling scenes acted just the other side

of a scrim through which surely I could reach

my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain

of time which is and isn’t and will be

the stuff of which we’re made and unmade.

In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen

your first nasty marriage just annulled,

thin from your abortion, clutching a book

against your cheek and trying to look

older, trying to look middle class,

trying for a job at Wanamaker’s,

dressing for parties in cast off

stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes

were hazy with dreams. You did not

notice me waving as you wandered

past and I saw your slip was showing.

You stood still while I fixed your clothes,

as if I were your mother. Remember me

combing your springy black hair, ringlets

that seemed metallic, glittering;

remember me dressing you, my seventy year

old mother who was my last dollbaby,

giving you too late what your youth had wanted.

3.

What is this mask of skin we wear,

what is this dress of flesh,

this coat of few colors and little hair?

This voluptuous seething heap of desires

and fears, squeaking mice turned up

in a steaming haystack with their babies?

This coat has been handed down, an heirloom

this coat of black hair and ample flesh,

this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.

This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks

they provided cushioning for my grandmother

Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me

and we all sat on them in turn, those major

muscles on which we walk and walk and walk

over the earth in search of peace and plenty.

My mother is my mirror and I am hers.

What do we see? Our face grown young again,

our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.

Our arms quivering with fat, eyes

set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,

our belly seamed with childbearing,

Give me your dress that I might try it on.

Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat.

I will not fit you mother.

I will not be the bride you can dress,

the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,

a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth.

You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.

Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks

barbed and drawing blood with their caress.

My twin, my sister, my lost love,

I carry you in me like an embryo

as once you carried me.

4.

What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?

Did I truly think you could put me back inside?

Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten

furnace and be recast, that I would become you?

What did you fear in me, the child who wore

your hair, the woman who let that black hair

grow long as a banner of darkness, when you

a proper flapper wore yours cropped?

You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery

flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.

Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.

Secretly the bones formed in the bread.

I became willful, private as a cat.

You never knew what alleys I had wandered.

You called me bad and I posed like a gutter

queen in a dress sewn of knives.

All I feared was being stuck in a box

with a lid. A good woman appeared to me

indistinguishable from a dead one

except that she worked all the time.

Your payday never came. Your dreams ran

with bright colors like Mexican cottons

that bled onto the drab sheets of the day

and would not bleach with scrubbing.

My dear, what you said was one thing

but what you sang was another, sweetly

subversive and dark as blackberries

and I became the daughter of your dream.

This body is your body, ashes now

and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,

my throat, my thighs. You run in me

a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,

you sing in my mind like wine. What you

did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

Marge Piercy

Mothers

the last time i was home

to see my mother we kissed

exchanged pleasantries

and unpleasantries pulled a warm

comforting silence around

us and read separate books

i remember the first time

i consciously saw her

we were living in a three room

apartment on burns avenue

mommy always sat in the dark

i don’t know how i knew that but she did

that night i stumbled into the kitchen

maybe because i’ve always been

a night person or perhaps because i had wet

the bed

she was sitting on a chair

the room was bathed in moonlight diffused through

those thousands of panes landlords who rented

to people with children were prone to put in windows

she may have been smoking but maybe not

her hair was three-quarters her height

which made me a strong believer in the samson myth

and very black

i’m sure i just hung there by the door

i remember thinking: what a beautiful lady

she was very deliberately waiting

perhaps for my father to come home

from his night job or maybe for a dream

that had promised to come by

“come here” she said “i’ll teach you

a poem: i see the moon

the moon sees me

god bless the moon

and god bless me”

i taught it to my son

who recited it for her

just to say we must learn

to bear the pleasures

as we have borne the pains

Nikki Giovanni

To My Mother

I was your rebellious son,

do you remember? Sometimes

I wonder if you do remember,

so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been

I wonder sometimes if it did not

precede my wrong, and I erred,

safe found, within your love,

prepared ahead of me, the way home,

or my bed at night, so that almost

I should forgive you, who perhaps

foresaw the worst that I might do,

and forgave before I could act,

causing me to smile now, looking back,

to see how paltry was my worst,

compared to your forgiveness of it

already given. And this, then,

is the vision of that Heaven of which

we have heard, where those who love

each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,

the light a music in the air,

and all is unentangled,

and all is undismayed.

Wendell Berry

The Invitation

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of furthur pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine and your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine and your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty, even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Thoughts from Benjamin Button

"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."

(Thank God for good friends.)