The Mother/Child Papers : With a New Preface by the Author [1 ed.] 9780822978268, 9780822960331

Citation preview

the mother/child papers

Pitt Poetry Ser ies Ed Ochester, Editor

ThE motheR/Child PApeRs with a new preface by the author

AliciA Suskin OstRiker  

university of pittsburgh press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright ©1980, 2009 by Alicia Suskin Ostriker All rights reserved Originally published by Momentum Press, Santa Monica, Calif. Published as a Beacon paperback in 1986. First University of Pittsburgh Press edition, 2009 Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6033-1 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6033-8 Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Quotation from Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen, reprinted with permission of Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence; Quotation from Feminine Psychology by Karen Horney, reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. Quotation from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by H. M. Parshley, reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Earlier versions of portions of this book appeared in The Smith, December, Feminist Studies, and Berkeley Poets’ Co-op. “The Change” and “In the Dust” appeared in Poetry, copyright ©1980 by Poetry.

For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex At this point I, as a woman, ask in amazement, and what about motherhood? And the blissful consciousness of bearing a new life inside oneself? And the ineffable happiness of the increasing expectation of the appearance of this new being? And the joy when it finally makes its appearance and one holds it for the first time in one’s arms? And the deep pleasurable feeling of satisfaction in suckling it and the happiness of the whole period when the infant needs her care? —Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology Bess who has been fingering a fruit-jar lid—absently, heedlessly dropped it—aimlessly groping across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! A look of neanderthal concentration is on her face. That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement; satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my powers; I! I! —Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio

Contents

Preface ix

I. Ca m bodi a   1 II. Moth er /Ch i ld   7 III. Th e Space s   31 Letter to M.  33 Song of the Abandoned One  34 Macbeth and the Kids in the Cabin at Chester  35 Things to Remember of Eve  36 In the Autumn of My Thirty-Seventh Birthday  37 Exile  40 The Spaces  41 Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas  43 The Leaf Pile  50 The Seven Samurai, The Dolly, and Mary Cassatt  52 The Change  53 One, to Fly  55 In the Dust  56 His Speed and Strength  58 I V: This Pow er   59 One Marries  61 This Power  64 Dream  65

preface

Some things change, some things do not change, some things appear to disappear, and then return. Women have been giving birth to babies for hundreds of thousands of years. It is likely that war has existed as long as people have existed. We human beings are a loving and violent species. The immediate trigger for The Mother/Child Papers was a cluster of events in 1970, when we were still in the quicksand of the Vietnam War: the invasion and bombing of Vietnam’s neighboring nation, Cambodia, announced by then-president Richard M. Nixon on April 30; the futile mass protests following this announcement; the killing of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen on May 4; the birth of my son Gabriel at Pasadena General Hospital on May 14, following an epidural anesthetic administered against my wishes, which numbed me from the waist down, preventing me from having the natural childbirth I had planned. The military invasion of a country parallels the medical invasion of a woman’s body. Technology provides the opportunity. Expert professionals give the orders. As for motivation: the need to control, to dominate, to conquer, while claiming that your invasion is for the benefit of the invaded, is as old as history. The personal is the political. That slogan wasn’t born yet, but the manifest parallel between military and medical invasions was impossible for me to ignore. I found also that I had to think, since I already had

‹ix›

two daughters but this was my first (and would be my last) son, about the meaning of having a boy child in wartime, and I had to realize that wartime is all of human history. Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, tells of a Frenchwoman remarking to her, when her son was born, “Madame, vous travaillez pour l’armée.” “Lady, you’re working for the army.” I feared, despairingly, that my newborn son was destined by history to be among the killed or the killers. What was I going to do about that, I who believed in love and tenderness? Experience and experiment share a Latin root: ex-periri, to find out. The Mother/Child Papers became an experimental work-in-progress, dealing with time. “Cambodia” as a prose poem links the global to the intimate at a specific moment. The second section of the book pursues psychic time as it unrolls, as the mind/body of a new mother and the mind/body of a newborn infant gradually pull apart from each other. How would one create a music, a form or set of forms, adequate to the miracle and the anguish of this unfolding of selves? The book’s third section evolved over a period of ten years, gathering scraps and fragments of a family’s existence in calendar time. It seemed, and continues to seem, important to deal with the huge mix of emotions a mother feels toward her children and herself as she and they emerge from the primordial soup. Instead of the sanitized stereotypes, there was all that ecstasy and agony, pride and shame, fear, guilt, joy, resentment, violence, exhaustion, awe, illumination, sweetness. Daily life, ephemeral as snow, permanent as rock. It seemed essential to find language for what Blake called “the minute particulars.” To acknowledge the eroticism of maternal love was important. Equally important was recognizing the anger and cruelty lurking within oneself, brushing up against the love. Was I opposed to war? Did I think only other people did harm in the world, never myself? As Marianne Moore says, “There never was a war that was not inward.” The final section of the book, “This Power,” presses through the pragmatic to another dimension, other modes of language, ultimately the timeless language of dream. When the book began, motherhood was not exactly a hot topic for

‹x›

poetry. One might say it was virtually taboo, with the understanding that taboos exist at an unconscious rather than a conscious level. Only when it is broken do we recognize that a taboo has existed. In 1970, people hardly mentioned pregnancy and childbirth in mixed company, let alone tried to make literature out of these embarrassingly gross female topics. I have been told I was “brave” to do this writing. It didn’t feel like bravery, it felt like necessity. If courage was involved in the creation of this book, it belonged to Bill Mohr, whom I knew slightly in 1977 as a member of the Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice, California, and as the singlehanded out-of-his-own-pocket publisher of Momentum, a poetry journal, and Momentum Books. Bill eked out a living as a typesetter and a poet in the schools. That is to say, he was penniless, but he ate and drank and worshiped poetry—especially the poetry of Southern California, which he championed with all his power. A year after my sojourn in California, Bill wrote to ask if I had a book manuscript. I told him I was struggling with this long-term project. He said if I could finish it within a year, he would publish it. His generosity and trust amazed me and enabled me to complete the work, which he published in 1980. It was reprinted in 1986 by Beacon Press, along with my book Stealing the Language; the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. I am grateful to my University of Pittsburgh Press editor, Ed Ochester, and my publisher, Cynthia Miller, for thinking it is still “timely.” Some things do change. American women’s poetry dealing with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood has burgeoned. Poetry anthologies focused on mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, mothers and grown children, cascade into publication. Mainstream and avant-garde poets join the dance. Men join it and write poems of fatherhood. We are of every social class, every ethnicity, every shade of sexuality. After millennia of silence, we have voices. We speak, we sing. Still, as I write, my country is at war. We have once again attacked a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us. Children die: our children and other peoples’ children. Twenty years after the National Guard fired

‹xi›

its thirteen-second fusillade into the crowd at Kent State University, the mother of one slain student told an interviewer that she thought her daughter’s death helped hasten America’s withdrawal from Vietnam. Another mother disagreed. “I’d like to think our children’s deaths had some larger meaning,” she said. “In truth, I don’t think they did.”1 Multiply that last sentence hundreds of thousands of times, and you get the picture. Fast-forward that sentence to the current war, and an antiwar activist whose son was killed in Iraq asks an NBC newsman, “As a mother, why would I want any other mother to suffer the way I am? Why would I want one more of our dear children to be killed for this mistake?”2 Go back a hundred years to World War I, and a hit song of 1915 is “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” with its chorus: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier/ I brought him up to be my pride and joy, / Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder, / To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?”3 Here are anger, grief, questions. They reach far backward in time, and they will continue into the future. Some things change slowly. It may or may not be true that poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden says. But I want to imagine what it would signify to women, and to men, to live in a culture where childbirth and mothering, with all their tangled complexity, with one foot in the home and one in the world, would occupy the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years, or the kind of position that warfare has occupied since literature began. What if everyone understood that the personal is the political? What then would be our daily life? What then would be our dream?

1. Arnold Abrams, “4 Children Lost Forever; Parents of Most Victims Carry Bitter Memories,” New York Newsday (Nassau and Suffolk Edition), May 30, 1990, 4. 2. “Sheehan Plays ‘Hardball’ with Matthews,” MSNBC, Aug. 16, 2005, http://www .msnbc.msn.com/id/8972147/. 3. The song was written by two men, lyricist Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi. For the full text of the lyrics, see http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4942.

‹xii›

I: Cambodia

My son Gabriel was born on May 14, 1970, during the Vietnam War, a few days after the United States invaded Cambodia, and a few days after four students had been shot by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest demonstration. On May 1, President Nixon announced Operation Total Victory, sending 5,000 American troops into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese military sanctuaries, in a test of “our will and character,” so that America would not seem “a pitiful helpless giant” or “accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.” He wanted his own war. The boy students stand in line at Ohio State each faces a Guardsman in gasmask each a bayonet point at his throat. U.S. air cavalry thrusts into Kompong Chain province, seeking bunkers. Helicopters descend on “The Parrot’s Beak.” B-52’s heavily bomb Red sanctuaries. Body count! Body count high! in the hundreds. The President has explained, and explains again, that this is not an invasion. Monday, May 4th, at Kent State, laughing demonstrators and rockthrowers on a lawn spotted with dandelions. It was after a weekend of beerdrinking. Outnumbered Guardsmen, partially encircled and out of tear gas, begin to retreat uphill, turn, kneel, in unison aim their guns. Four students lie dead, seventeen wounded. 441 colleges and universities strike, many shut down. The President says: “When dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” A veteran of the Khe Sanh says: “I saw enough violence, blood and death and I vowed never again, never again . . . Now I must protest. I’m not a leftist but I can’t go any further. I’ll do damn near anything to stop the war now.” A man in workclothes tries to seize an American flag from a student. “That’s my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it! . . . To hell with your movement. We’re fed up with your movement. You’re forcing us in­to it.

‹3›

We’ll have to kill you.” An ad salesman in Chicago: “I’m getting to feel like I’d actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people, I’m just so goddamned mad.” One, two, three, four, we don’t want! your fucking war! They gathered around the monument, on the wet grass, Dionysiac, beaded, flinging their clothes away. New England, Midwest, Southwest, cupfuls of innocents leave the city and buy farmland. At the end of the frontier, their backs to the briny Pacific, buses of tourists gape at the aciddropping children in the San Francisco streets. A firebomb flares. An electric guitar bleeds. Camus: “I would like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” Some years earlier, my two daughters were born, one in Wisconsin at a progressive university hospital where doctors and staff behaved affec­ tionately, one in England where the midwife was a practical woman who held onto my feet and when she became impatient with me said: PUSH, Mother. Therefore I thought I knew what childbirth was supposed to be: a woman gives birth to a child, and the medical folk assist her. But in the winter of 1970 I had arrived five months pregnant in Southern California, had difficulty finding an obstetrician who would take me, and so was now tasting normal American medical care. It tasted like money. During my initial visit to his ranch-style offices on a street where the palm trees lifted their heads into the smog like a row of fine mulatto ladies, Dr. Keensmile called me “Alicia” repeatedly, brightly, benignly, as if I were a child or a servant. I hated him right away. I hated his suntan. I knew he was untrue to his wife. I was sure he played golf. The routine delivery anesthetic for him and his group was a spinal block, he said. I explained that I would not need a spinal since I had got by before on a couple of cervical shots, assumed that deliveries were progressively easier, and wanted to decide about drugs myself when the time came. He smiled tolerantly at the ceiling. I remarked that I liked childbirth. I remarked that childbirth gave a woman an opportunity for supreme pleasure and heroism.

‹ 4›

He smiled again. They teach them, in medical school, that pregnancy and birth are diseases. He twinkled. Besides, it was evident that he hated women. Perhaps that was why he became an obstetrician. Just be sure and watch your weight, Alicia. Smile. I toyed, as I swelled and bulged like a watermelon, with the thought of driving out into the Mohave to have the baby. I continued my visits to Dr. Keensmile. I did not talk to Dr. Keensmile about Cambodia. I did not talk to him about Kent State. Sauve qui peut. You want a child of life, stay away from psychic poison. In the waiting room I found pamphlets which said that a newborn baby must be fed on a strict schedule, as it needed the discipline, and that one must not be moved by the fact that it would cry at first, as this was good for it, to start it out on the right foot. And my daughters were laughing at me for my difficulty in buckling their sandals. In labor, I discovered that I could have an enjoyable time if I squatted on the bed, rocked a little while doing my breathing exercises, and sang songs in my head. The bed had muslin curtains drawn around it; nobody would be embarrassed by me. So I had settled into a melody and had been travelling downstream with it for some long duration, when a nurse came through the curtains, stork white, to ask if I was ready for my shot. Since the pains were becoming strong and I felt unsure about keeping control through the transitional stage of labor, which is the hardest, I said fine, expecting a local. This would temporarily alleviate the pain of the faststretching cervix, leaving other muscles free. Of course, it was a sedative. I grew furry. They lay me down. I was eight fingers dilated, only five or seven minutes away from the final stage of labor, where a woman needs no drugs because she becomes a goddess. Then Dr. Keensmile appeared to ask if I was ready for my spinal. A faint flare of “no” passed, like a moonbeam. Because of the Demerol, if they had asked me whether I was ready to have my head severed, I probably would have said yes. Drool ran from my mouth. Yes, I said. When they wheeled me to the delivery room, I fought to maintain wakeful consciousness despite the Demerol, and fought to push, with my own

‹5›

body, to give birth to my child myself, despite the fact that I could feel nothing—nothing at all—below the waist, as if I did not exist there, as if I had been cut in half and bandaged. A stainless place. I am conscious, only my joy is cut off. I feel the stainless will of everyone. Nothing red in the room. I am sweating. Death. The black-haired head, followed by the supple limbs, emerges in the mirror. The doctor says it is a boy. Three thoughts fall, like file cards. One: Hooray! We made it! Finito! Two: YOU SONOFABITCHING BASTARD, NEXT TIME I’M GOING TO DO THIS RIGHT. Three: What next time? Our bodies and our minds shoot into joy, like trees into leaves. Playfulness as children, sex, work with muscles, work with brains. Some bits survive, where we are lucky, or clever, or we fight. The world will amputate what it can, wanting us cripples. Cut off from joy, how many women conceive? Cut off, how many bear? And cut, how many give birth to their children? Now I am one of them. I did not fight. Beginning a day after my son’s birth, and continuing for a week, I have swordlike headaches, which I at­t ribute to the spinal. I am thirty-three. In the fall I will be back at work, back East. My husband and I have two daughters, both all right so far, and now the son for whom we were hoping. There will never be a next time.

What does this have to do with Cambodia?

‹6›

II: mother/child

was dreaming   be water  was      multiply dreaming water   inherit      in     earth

‹9›

The Guards kneeled, they raised their weapons, they fired into the crowd to protect the peace. There was a sharp orange-red explosion, diminished by the great warm daylight, a match scratching, a whine, a tender thud, then the sweet tunnel, then nothing. Then the tunnel again, the immense difficulty, pressure, then the head finally is liberated, then they pull the body out.

‹10›

was dreaming water was        falling and        rising all            along could            not see then               a barrier a               color red then                      cold and                     very afraid

‹11›

They hoist it, shining, they support it, under artificial lights, under the neck and knees, it is limp as a glove, a handful of tendrils, the mother watches it inhale and flex, the bloodclot over the navel already brown, the father is blushing, he notices how the genitals nod and bob, ornamental and puffy, mushrooms and ladyslipper, do you hear this fellow yell now, smiles the doctor, he’ll be a soldier. They have wiped the flesh, it becomes a package, they wheel it away, clean and alone, the mother rests on a plump pillow and is weeping in the pretty room, her breasts are engorged, she is filling with desire, she has thrown a newspaper to the floor, her television is dark, her intention is to possess this baby, this piece of earth, not to surrender a boy to the ring of killers. They bring him, crying. Her throat leaps.

‹12›

and sleep     and cry        la la          and cry             and sleep

‹13›

Nothing is changed. The sun beats down, the traffic moves Higgledy piggledy, pumpkin and pine nobody’s baby is prettier than mine The husband and the daughters go away and we forget them We open all the windows the sunlight wraps us like gauze

‹14›

it hurts   it is impossible      to stop the pain     it is impossible   come when it happens           please come when it happens                      please

‹15›

I come the way that moon comes, stars, the tides, it is involuntary, only God knows what elastic pulls me to his hunger, what laws make me gaze at that pink forehead as if it were quite transparent, as if I could see what is happening daily, the way everything is getting attached, getting hooked up there in his head, the way they are throwing a settlement together, with real streets, a marketplace, buying and selling, and outside the town the ground to break, the people sowing and harvesting, already planning a city, and I want to see it, I want to.

‹16›

  one  is  inside but things take shape          vanish but reappear

  that is   beautiful

‹17›

Greedy baby sucking the sweet tit your tongue tugging the nipple tickles your mama your round eyes open appear to possess understanding when you suckle I am slowly moved in my sensitive groove you in your mouth are alive, I in my womb a book lies in my lap I pretend to read I turn some pages, when satiated a moment you stop sucking to smile up with your toothless milky mouth I smile down, and my breast leaks it hurts, return your lashes close, your mouth again clamps on you are attentive as a business man your fisted fingers open relaxing and all rooms are rooms for suckling in all woods are woods for suckling in all boulevards for suckling sit down anywhere, all rivers are rivers for suckling by— I have read that in all wars, when a city is taken, women are raped, and babies stabbed in their little bellies and hoisted up to the sky on bayonets—

‹18›

Here is the lady, here is the lady who makes peace      suffering         bliss           suffering                peace

‹19›

The door clicks. He returns to me. He brings fresh air in, We kiss, we touch. I am holding the flannel-wrapped baby. The girls run to him. He takes his jacket off and waltzes the weightless bundle over his shoulder. We eat dinner, and evening falls. I have bathed the girls. I walk by our broad bed. Upon it rests a man in a snow white shirt, like a great sleepy bird. Next to him rests his seed, his son. Lamplight falls on them both. If a woman looks, at such a sight, is the felt pang measureless pleasure? Is it measureless pain?

‹20›

Here is the strong one, the other Here is the strong one, the other

one after the other

Here is the strong one, the other Here is the strong one, the other

after the other after

‹21›

Hour after beastly hour. I swear I try. You claw my skin, my nipple. Am a witch. Am dry. Cannot endure an existence chained to your cry. Incubus.  Leech.  Scream. You confine me. Die.

‹22›

I can    do what    I want Overturn             this body

‹23›

A glass pane toward the spectral, mysterious garden, a Santa Ana wind through the live-oaks, ammonia pungent in the nostrils, no sunrise yet. You lay on the changing table, meowing, wet. I made you naked, laying nightgown fabric aside, kissing your neck, your feet, your ribs, the powdery skin-creases. You kicked and waved your thin arms, randomly. I whispered and blew into your stomach, to tickle. My face being down, then, while I was blind, somebody’s hand quietly grasped my hand. When I looked up it was you, laughing laughing! a power such as flew out and nearly knocked me over through your staring eyes intense, impersonal, like icy dawn like the son of beauty, the bow bent, and the arrows drawn — as once in midday three white clouds raced right across the zenith of the bright blue sky a wild west wind ripped at their edges like cotton, and they flew — outside a white cat jumps from a garden fence, glides through the yellow grass yet but a naked, helpless kicking one— you were those things I saw! and I have seen. I shall be singing this when all the forests you have burned are green. ‹24›

These are my hands I seize what I want you bars you who interrupt me I will eat you

‹25›

Damn, it’s late, I   have an appointment, where   the hell is my briefcase, girls, get going to school, honey,   wait in the car, I’ll be right   with you, okay, the formula is in the fridge, it isn’t   necessary to heat it, just   feed him around every three or four hours, I’ll nurse   him tonight, he likes the radio   and dancing around to pop songs, and you also might   take him outside in the morning   before the smog hits give him here a minute I hold you, boy, I leave you here a minute like jewelry like grapes like perfume like a music box like silky many nice things to touch I love     I love Higgledy piggledy my blue pig you’re not very little and not very big   The Guard kneeled   The Guard kneeled.

‹26›

and bright     and warm         la la            and loud              and sweet one after the other after the other after

‹27›

Par agr aphs If you look at a mother with a newborn infant, you see not two animals but one. They are placed in a kind of trance together, so that even when separated, a fleecy mesh connects them. The mother seems sleepy. She acts in a dream. She has little conversation, but shines at people, and wants to show them the baby, soft in its soft clothes and blankets. We see this also among the great sociable apes: when a new chimpanzee is born, the mother shyly exhibits it. Females, males, even dominant males, as well as older juveniles, come by to look and fondle it. That fondling, touching-activity, vocalization; these are to teach, they rise from the forest like birds, so that beyond the sleeping, crying, feeding, shared by the mother and child, is pride of accomplishment. It kicks, it waves wild arms, it holds up its head up on its stem. It will roll over, crawl, grow teeth. At the same time, anger. This is a prison. It exhausts the sap, the very juice. It does nothing but open its mouth. Can she never regain her autonomous self, her sunny wind-drenched leaves? She wants to kick—get off me, parasite. To kill it. To go mad. All that is weak invites the brute. If I fail to acknowledge my will to murder the child, to wipe him like spill from a counter— then all that I call my love will evaporate, will choke. When the mists lift, there are images. What the mother sees is the divine infant, showing where they come from, Eros, Jesus, Krishna, Blake’s boy on the cloud commanding song. What does the child see, when he smiles at her as if he would be happy forever? As in the chapel ceiling, in the creation: the aged and youthful heroic figures recline amid clouds, their forefingers just parted. Michelangelo as an artist would have known: that which was once within you, life of life, you create in freedom. You release it, you open your hand, you let it go. In a few weeks that particular smile will pass, from the mother, to the father, to others.

‹28›

Mother/Child: Coda Fear teaches nothing         that is my message but O to grow means pain means division the crust cracks and the open   organism faces danger the grass plant bladed and seeded, the forked spruce   burst from the mountain’s northern side, that never    asked to breathe, here in this cold, but must.              

It is the oldest, saddest story. The oceans were ebbing. The climate was chilling. Anyone who had a lung was forced to live, not die. Anyone who had a leg was forced to leap. The driven soldiers of the cause. March. Think. Pay no attention to the corpses. Do not attempt to join them. March. Your task is to survive. You are permitted to feel triumph. Here is water, here is dry land, up there is the kingly sky and queenly moon, a desire to turn back and a desire to go on are the permanent instructions, and we know that this has something to do with our souls, also that “go on” for any individual thing or creature at first means “play,” “multiply,” “strike deep, aim straight” and “trust,” but that later this changes and means “it is too late,”

‹29›

“take your last journey,” “we love you, but goodbye.” We do not know yet what the instructions signify for an entire species, a muddy ooze, and we cannot make any prognosis on those levels or answer the intimate question             shall all life perish like us, the perfect crest subside? I am glad and sorry to give you this information. I see you know it already. I want to tell you it is not your fault. It is your fault. So from now on you are responsible. This is what we mean when we say consciousness is a curse. Meanwhile we are looking into each other’s eyes, windows of homes, and touching, with sweet pleasure, each other’s downy surfaces. You will never forget this, will always seek, beyond every division, a healing of division, renewed touch. You see the silver bridge spanning a flood? This is what we mean when we say consciousness is a blessing.

‹30›

III: the spaces

Letter to M. Dear M. I am writing to thank you for the gift of the pipe, and your kind note, “Lactation with representation,” which has given me some midnight chuckles. I have, you will be interested to know—as a mother of three and a graduate student of English literature—been redeeming the time I spend with Gabriel in the rocking chair. He is the sweetest thing, intense at first, then dribbling and snoozing, but of course they all were. Possibly because he is my last, and when this phase is finished I will be that much closer to the stupor and the letting go, I am thinking about the erotic pleasure of nursing. You remember, I hope. To see them visibly grow, fed by us—it is almost too much. And then the sensation itself, like a cat lapping; only we are the innocent cat. You remember? I don’t believe I have ever seen a discussion of this experience; or indeed, any mention of the idea that we can be sexually aroused by being suckled, and that suckling is (biologically must be, just as orgasm during inter­ course for a man must be, to insure survival of the species) physically pleasurable, one of the most pleasurable things it is possible for a human to do. Why do we not say this? Why are mothers always represented sen­ timentally, as having some sort of altruistically self-sacrificing “maternal” feelings, as if they did not enjoy themselves? Is it so horrible if we enjoy ourselves: another love that dare not tell its name?

‹33›

Song of the Abandoned One Kill the baby I am sorry kill the baby by poking its eyes by smashing its head by hitting it very hard in the body stupid father and mother do you want to see something in the garden the calla lily that was the biggest well it broke snails are on it snails are on it very ugly and I don’t care I can rub my quilted cotton blanket against my cheek and I want my own silver cup with milk in it and I want to push my blanket on top of the rubber arms and legs and ugly doll face, please can you kill the baby I am sorrow kill the baby

‹34›

Macbeth and the Kids in the Cabin at Chester Storm and the night outside. But we in our cozy cabin have the Coleman lanterns, have wine, have a smoke, turn on the radio, and good, here is Macbeth. We have already lain Gabe in his crib. J. sits Rebecca on his lap. Evie snuggles on mine, too young to understand but she doesn’t want to miss anything so will risk being scared. Act One. This is Rebecca’s meat. She has not read the Blue Fairy Book, the Green Fairy Book, the Red Fairy Book for nothing. “They’re telling the truth, right?” Witches are easy for this crystalline audience, and “He’ll murder the king, right?” Asking questions all the time, cold July rain, wild flashes lighting the woods, the frothing stream, bright instantaneous blue. Come the murders, she is looking bad, sad, troubled. Comes Act Four, “Macbeth is going to be punished, right?” Now the light thickens, and as that cunning showman, that woolmerchant, hauls forth his lightningclap, dusty torment, she thinks and finally says, “I don’t want Macbeth to die.” My darling, my true chime, Shakespeare wrote it for you, and Aristotle had you in mind!         Now in a little while the play is over. Meanwhile Evie’s been doing her best half catching the plot and half pretending sleep, petting my breast, only now she’s imagining black bugs on the cabin wall, we have to keep chasing them, killing— though the wine is gone, the sleeping bags laid out— Oh stern deep child. You are right, art is art, but demons are demons. You grapple, you claw, it is another country. Meanwhile the rain keeps pouring. Talk does not help, so we run a tickling contest, which works, and we go to sleep. ‹35›

Things to R emember of Eve The next door lady’s kitten died. Eve set crossed sticks and poppies above the grave. The next door lady’s kid has a sty. His thin blond hair flits in the wind like buttercups. She is skinny, hard and smart lower class and crazy thinks men are rats takes a lot of dope bites her mulberry honey fingernails Her man is gone and she is twenty-one. Evie is eight and watches out for things through hazel eyes.

‹36›

In the Autumn of My Thirty-Seventh Birthday Going to work on the bus     —Needles strike the window, O it’s gonna be a cold rain says an old woman.   * Leave dreary desk take walk on dreary campus within his bending sickle’s compass come   seed pods    brown hard durable I collect them        and recall   the pulse, desire and flight of a drift of timorous cherry blossoms outside my house an age ago, last spring: Must I go, then? Must I learn to crawl naked into the cold?   * In the afternoon on the bus schoolgirls are flirting and shrieking. Their glow does not concern them but penetrates through bus walls and hurtles for miles through the wet Jersey woods as we drive past the graveyard and then past houses where they live and yelling one by one get off.   * ‹37›

Slick Joni Mitchell on the record player spaghetti and meatballs salad ice cream Gabriel’s laughter Rebecca’s hair Eve’s hazel eyes J’s victory at squash William Carlos Williams dancing nude nothing to me, nothing, nothing. It is right here, the hole no good thing fills.   * Behind me there is an eye of a mysterious monster says Gabriel but when I turn around it hides   (we riding bike    up to Jack & Jill    for extra sweets)    and while he hugs me    the pumpkins rot     in the fields   * 12:30 a.m. J. like a pod next to me I want to sleep, I want my healing dreams Long conversation with N. just divorced her shrink tells her to take anti-depressant pills

‹38›

she doesn’t want to her shrink says she’ll be a winning horse she doesn’t want to— what does she want?  to die? Gabriel howling off and on like a light bulb   or a dark bulb—confused—like rushing     winds, branches thwarting branches     he calls, and cannot stop. I go to him. .

‹39›

Exile The downward turning touch the cry of time fire falling without sound plunge my hand in the wound children marching and dying all that I do is a crime because I do not reach their mouths silently crying my boychild reaches with his mouth it is easy, being a mother his skin is tender and soft kisses stitch us together we love as long as we may then come years without kisses when he will turn away not to waste breath when I too will fall embracing a pillow at night touching the stone of exile reaching my hand to death

during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, 1975

‹ 40›

The Spaces A windy, snowy, January evening. Nobody on the street. It is pitch dark when I get off the bus. In the cones of the streetlamps the plunging snowflakes look like bits of soot. But everywhere else, whiteness sug­gesting infinity above and about me. I have a briefcase full of James Joyce papers to read, and also I should reread Blake’s Songs of Innocence before tomorrow. I am aware of how peaceful the snow is, in spite of the wind. It is like a divine Blakean father when we are ill, caring for us, patient. I can feel that there is already a layer between my boots and the pavement. I think how lovely it is to imagine the whole area over which a snowfall is gently descending—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware—and also of the snowflake structure, ice crystal plus spaces, that makes the gentleness. By the time I reach my gate I am unreasonably happy. I will make a curry for dinner, my briefcase feels like air. The children are in the front yard, silhouettes coated with fleece. I pull their boots off. We talk about the snow, whether it will be good for packing. I boil rice, broccoli, get out a frying pan, start rolling lamb balls in my palms. The lamb is greasy. Rebecca is singing and her pure voice fills the kitchen like a snowfall. If I try to sing harmony with her she may let me or she may fall silent. Her voice is purer than mine, mine stronger than hers. She intends her voice to be both pure and strong, and in a year or two it will be. Eve is chopping onions and wants attention. She is wear­ ing the lambskin hat I gave her, that I bought last winter in Hebron, Israel, from a snaggle-tooth Arab who smiled like hot coffee and wanted to kill me. Little lamb, who made thee. I wonder how Rebecca and I will each feel when she excels me. Gabriel clings to my legs, a butterfly, my legs stems, the odor of me too he likes, my yellow kitchen an artifical summer. Eve lends me the hat. I snuggle my face in its fleeciness. J. in the living room talks to a visiting young astrophysicist. The question is the mass of the universe. If the universe is sufficiently massive it will

‹ 41›

stop expanding and its gravity will cause it to implode, which acceleratingly will suck it back to the original fireball. The other possibility is that it grows older, colder, dead, forever, dispersed. Victory for en­tropy. The cat is begging for some lamb. I give it a scrap and continue rolling the greasy balls. I hope my Joyce papers will be good, and I wonder if eating increases entropy if a higher form of life devours a lower. Then I wonder what happens to the structure of snowflakes when we pack them. Gabriel runs upstairs. Rebecca is reading. Eve takes the hat back, she squats to pet the cat, proprietary, it is her cat. Outside my window, the whole street dark and snowy.

‹ 42›

Propaganda Poem: Maybe for Some Young Mamas 1. The Visiting Poet (after reading the girls my old pregnancy poem that I thought ripe and beautiful after they made themselves clear it was ugly after telling the girls I would as soon go to my grave a virgin, god forbid, as go to my grave without ever bearing and rearing a child I laughed and if looks could kill I would have been one dead duck in that        so-called “feminist” classroom) Oh young girls in a classroom with your smooth skins like paper not yet written on your good American bodies, your breasts, your bellies fed healthy on hamburgers and milkshakes, almost like photographs in solution half-developed I leaned and strained toward you, trying to understand what you were becoming as you sat so quietly under the winter light that fell into our classroom and I tried, as a teacher, to transmit information that’s my job, knowledge like currency you have to spend it oh young mamas no matter what your age is you are born when you give birth to a baby you start over one animal ‹ 43›

and both gently just slightly separated from each other swaying, swinging like a vine, like an oriole nest keep returning to each other like a little tide, like a little wave for a little while better than sex, that bitter honey, maybe could be the connection you’ve been waiting for because no man is god, no woman is a goddess we are all of us spoiled by that time but a baby             any baby               your baby is                     the most perfect human thing you can ever touch translucent and I want you to think about   touching and the pleasure of   touching and being touched by this most perfect thing this pear tree blossom this mouth these leafy hands these genitals like petals a warm scalp resting against your cheek fruit’s warmth beginning— Curtains curtains you say young girls we want to live our lives don’t want the burden the responsibility the disgusting mess of children

‹ 44›

we want our freedom and we want it now I see you shudder truly and I wonder what kind of lives you want so badly to live or who has cut you with what axes from the sense of your flowing sap or why are you made of sand young girls will you walk out of this door and spend your substance freely or who has shown to you the greedy mirror the lying mirror the desert sand— I am telling you and you can take me for a fool there is no good time like the good time a whole mama has with a whole little baby and that’s                   where the first images of deity came from—sister you know it’s true you know in secret how they cut us down because who can bear the joy that hurts nobody the dazzling circuit of contact without dominance that by the way might make you less vulnerable to cancer and who knows what other diseases of the body because who can bear a thing that makes you happy and rolls the world a little way                      on forward                      toward its destiny because a woman is acceptable if she is weak acceptable if she is a victim

‹ 45›

acceptable also if she is an angry victim (“shrew,”  “witch”) a woman’s sorrow is acceptable a deodorized sanitized sterilized antiperspirant grinning efficient woman is certainly acceptable but who can tolerate the power of a woman close to a child, riding our tides into the sand dunes of the public spaces.

‹ 46›

2. Postscr ipt to Propaganda That they limit your liberty, of course, entirely. That they limit your cash. That they limit your sleep. Your sleep is a dirty torn cloth. That they whine until you want to murder them. That their beauty prevents you. That their eating and excreting exactly resembles the slime-trails of slugs. On your knees you follow, cleaning, unstaining. That they burn themselves, lacerate themselves, bruise themselves. That they get ill. That you sit at their bedsides exhausted, coughing, reading dully to them, wiping their foreheads with wet washcloths to lower the fever, your life peeling away from you like layers of cellophane. Of course. That you are wheels to them. That you are grease. An iron doorway they kick open, they run out, nobody has remembered to close it. That their demanding is a grey north wind. That their sullenness is a damp that rots your wood, their malice a metal that draws your blood, their disobedience the fire that burns your sacred book, their sorrows the webbing that entraps you like a thrashing fish. That when your child grieves, mother, you bend and grieve. That you disentwine yourself from them, lock the pores of your love, set them at a distance. That in this fashion the years pass, like calendar pages flipped in a silent movie, and you are old, you are wrinkled as tortoises. Come on, you daughters of bitches, do you want to live forever?

‹ 47›

3. What Actually What a lot of garbage we all shovel. What a lot of self-serving, self-pitying rhetoric we splash around in. We paint ourselves wrong. How can I, to paraphrase the poet, say what I actually mean? What, anyway, do I mean? About motherhood? It is the unanimity that offends me. The ideological lockstep, that cannot permit women, humans, simply to choose for themselves. When I was in college everyone expected to get married and have babies, and everyone thought this was her own idea, although from this distance we can see that we were programmed. Presently everyone believes motherhood is the sinister invention of patriarchy. This week in Paris I learn that the serious intellectual women are into lesbianism, incest, armed violence and the theory of hysteria. G. gave her slide lecture on the re-emergence of the goddess image in women’s art and was called a Nazi. How can I be a Nazi, she said, I’m a Jew. A friend’s daughter dies of crib death. She tries to have another, fails. Fails. Fails. She and her husband divorce, she moves to another town, in a year she is pregnant. She does not want to marry the nice young man. She does not want an abortion. She keeps her job, she has the baby, she prays. A friend crosses her fifty-year-old legs in bluejeans, swallows her vodka and says she knows that nothing but her sobbing when at last she was alone in the airport parking lot kept her children’s jet from crashing in the Atlantic. A friend’s green-eyed son has leukemia, he plays baseball, he collects stamps, she buys a camera and takes pictures of him in teeshirt and shorts, as naked as she dares.

‹ 48›

Born. I believe that some of us are born to be mamas, nobody can know how many or which ones. We are probably identifiable at an early age by our foolish happiness in the presence of smaller children. Some born not to be. Some in the middle. Were there maybe a few young mamas sitting in that classroom in the winter light, subdued, their codes inaudible? Were they afraid to choose? Have we not explained to the young that choice equals risk? Wanted to tell them to decode themselves, like unwrapping a package carefully, not to damage it. Wanted to tell them, mamas or not mamas, we all get damaged when put to use, we get like wornout houses, but only the life that hoards and coffins itself is already dead.

New Brunswick 1975–Paris 1979

‹ 49›

The Leaf Pile Now here is a typical children’s story that happens in gorgeous October when the mothers are coming in the afternoon, wearing brisk boots and windy skirts to pick up the little children from the day care center Frost in the air the maples golden and crimson my son in a leaf pile in the playground dreaming I am late, the playground is almost empty, my husband will kill me I gather my son to go home, he forgets his sweater in the playground and I send him back he dawdles, he is playing with leaves in his mind, it is already a quarter to six, will you come on I say and hurry along the corridor, there are yellow and blue rocket paintings, but I feel bad and ask what did you do today, do you recognize this story, the way he stands and picks his nose, move I say, do you want dinner or not I’m going to make a nice dinner, fried chicken I wheedle, so could you please walk a little faster, okay, I walk a little faster and get upstairs myself, pivot on boot-heel, nobody there, he is putting something in his mouth, his sable eyelashes downcast, and I am swooping down the stairwell screaming

‹50›

damn you that’s filthy I told you not before dinner We are climbing the stairs and I am crying, my son is not crying I have shaken him, I have pried the sweet from his cheek I have slapped his cheek like a woman slapping a carpet with all my strength mothers are very strong he is too young to do anything about this will not remember he remembers it The mind is a leaf pile where you can bury anything, pain, the image of a woman who wears a necklace of skulls, a screaming woman you dig quickly and deposit the pulpy thing you drop leaves on it and it stays there, that is the story that is sticking in my mind as we push the exit door, and run through the evening wind to my car where I jerk the gearshift and pick up a little speed, going along this neat suburban avenue full of maples the mark of my hand a blush on my son’s cheek.

‹51›

The Seven Samurai, The Dolly, and Mary Cassatt I am sitting in my kitchen writing something in my notebook about The Seven Samurai, which appears on first viewing to be a cross between a western and a war film but more aristocratic than either. Its types include the experienced warrior; the youth; the acrobatic zany; the pure techni­ cian—perhaps a disciple of Zen? I seldom watch pictures with undiluted male values. Courage versus cowardice, character versus corruption, manly skill and grace, youthful idealism, a good cause consisting of somber scenery, helpless peasantry, and singleminded martial unity; these I took to be the principles we were intended to admire. J. thought so too but he was bored and repelled and I was interested. After all, I am trying to understand men. The pure technician in one scene makes some peasants turn back from a retreat by threatening to kill them. This reminds me of a similar scene in Coriolanus, and I dimly see how Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s more loathsome figures, might be considered a genuine hero. What I like about sitting up in my kitchen at night is the solitude. The yellow walls. The black oblongs of windows. Rebecca prances into the kitchen wearing a cotton nightie. I say Hello, Dolly. She flounces around the table, does a couple of showdance steps, and sashays out the door, wiggling her hips. I call after her, You did that very well. She calls back, Thank you. My thoughts about The Seven Samurai and Coriolanus are now like a school of minnows that were ex­ploring near the surface of a lake when someone threw a stone in. It is remarkable the way stasis can become motion, darting, flashing, disap­pearing radially. Eve sidles into the kitchen wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt. I must stop writing about the interruption of one child in order to help the other with a report about Mary Cassatt. I don’t really want to. She smiles winningly. Gabriel arrives and tells me the story of the invisible man and his bird. Did I wish to hear it again. Perfection of the life or of the art: I think of how Yeats said that, and how at twenty it made me angry, that dualism. I wanted both! When will this stop? I lay my notebook aside. The report is fine. What I like about Mary Cassatt is Philadelphia, white gloves, the boulevards of Paris, the merry childlessness of art. ‹52›

The Change Happening now! it is happening now! even while, after these grey March weeks— when every Saturday you drive out of town into the country to take your daughter to her riding lesson and along the thin curving road you peer into the brown stuff— still tangled, bare, nothing beginning. Nothing beginning, the mud, the vines, the corpse-like trees and their floor of sodden leaves unaltered, oh, you would like to heave the steering wheel from its socket or tear your own heart out, exasperated— that it should freeze and thaw, then freeze again, and that no buds have burst, sticky, deep red, from their twigs — You want to say it to your daughter. You want to tell her also how the grey beeches, ashes and oaks here on Cherry Hill Road on the way to her riding school feel the same, although they cannot rip themselves up by the roots, or run about raving, or take any action whatever, and are almost dead with their wish to be alive,

‹53›

to suck water, to send force through their fibers and to change! to change! Your daughter, surly, unconversational, a house locking its doors against you, pulls away when you touch her shoulder, looks out the window. You are too old. You remind her of frozen mud. Nevertheless it is happening, the planet is swimming toward the sun like a woman with naked breasts. She cannot help it. Can you sense, under the ground, the great melting?

‹54›

One, to Fly The two-year-old flops onto the kitchen floor. He says, I am dead, ma ma and immediately starts to wiggle and giggle. Hiya, hiya he says when he is an Indian. In nursery school what he has is three wishes. One, to fly, and he really wants that a lot. Two, to talk to animals, especially dogs. Three, no more war. When the boys in second-grade recess play Spider Man, kick sand at each other, fight to hurt, he is the littlest. They make him know it. Baby want a bottle, they say when he does not play. The nine-year-old lifts weights with his father. He says Fat Stephen in school punched him but he hit back. He is reading A Wrinkle in Time twice because kids fly in it.

‹55›

IN THE DUST This year, she announces to us all at dinner, in ballet class she has discovered “perfection.” At the swimming pool all day she practices dives, stretches out on her towel like an array of astronomical sensors. She reads The Great Gatsby, cries. It is deep summer, it is blazing August. I read, I write poems, I make moist love with my husband, quarrel with him, cry, make turbulent love. He tends the garden, she is polite to me. August, heat, dust. When I wash her hair, I want to run my hands over her nude body, her readiness. On the birthday morning we drive to the jeweller’s in the jewelled August sun. She takes my hand to cross the bright street, asking if it will hurt, and I say it will sting like a doctor’s needle. She runs ahead to the shop, where the bearded jeweler punctures her lobes. It is evening. We are carrying dishes, glasses and wrappings in from the garden, wearing our long skirts, saying the party was nice. Her girlfriends came and admired her fourteen carat studs, and they played sedately. Now she lingers and rubs her feet in the grass.

‹56›

What is that whirling in the dust? What is that powerful movement, everywhere, so rapid she cannot see it? The fireflies are making their phosphorus, slow circles, the appletrees ripening, and she is going willingly. I send her willingly.

‹57›

His Speed and Str ength His speed and strength, which is the strength of ten years, races me home from the pool. First I am ahead, Niké, on my bicycle, no hands, and the Times crossword tucked in my rack, then he is ahead, the Green Hornet, buzzing up Witherspoon, flashing around the corner to Nassau Street. At noon sharp he demonstrated his neat one-and-a-half flips off the board: Oh, brave. Did you see me, he wanted to know. And I doing my backstroke laps was Juno Oceanus, then for a while I watched some black and white boys wrestling and joking, teammates, wet plums and peaches touching each other as if it is not necessary to make hate, as if Whitman was right and there is no death. A big wind at our backs, it is lovely, the maple boughs ride up and down like ships. Do you mind if I take off, he says. I’ll catch you later, see you, I shout and wave, as he peels away, pedalling hard, rocket and pilot.

‹58›

Iv: this power

One Marries For my son: To fear himself, and love all human kind ­— Shelley

One marries, why    to live with terror, as a man might    approach tigers, he approaches     the mountain bride,      a cave, all overgrown, bushy—    and honeyed, dank, and if all     he can manage is to plant a flag there,     a tower, or whatever it is, a cannon, a    muscle—he has failed, but how to endure that gigantic    lightning, although he seeks    it purely.       Others seek empire, discovery in pursuit of conquest, to control, to rule the savages, the savage, the inviting    lush wilderness, “plants    of a sumptuousness and variety they have never    imagined,” and their glossy and matted fruits. Those others want    to guarantee dominion, perfect    perfect as death, and he does not. But marriage? marriage? impossible  balance      the moon, virgin, he wants the moon

‹61›

and it is not within him, or is within him    as a mask, a bright shadow,             a drawing forth                in waves that break,                curiously, back and forth He   must accomplish research, consider what is natural. Consider the chimpanzee, the pygmy, the whale. But he remembers         Ants have discipline, and hordes, and          war for slaughter or slavery, he does not know    what other heroism may be possible He is afraid he sees        no marriage, nor brotherhood, except          for larger conquests          against time, and never          at rest in the child’s          song he remembers, when       he married syllables to melody        at the close of the evening         surrounded by toys,          before he learned, even,           the language . . . and       his parents sat, under        their lamps, listening         to him, peacefulness          raining down on them useless                       as air . . . that                     is what he wants

‹62›

They will move to the city fearful     and yet the symphony is natural    the sculpture natural, the slaughterhouse, the city    itself shapeliest, sloven     in strength and lights       beside a proud river, no commerce on that artery, no rivet, no concrete, no   stretched glass but the mind’s      extended play made truth                as if the bride                let drift the veil away               and the wind took it, toward autumn,               and she let fall her gown, white,              stiff or clinging, the fabric, many-folded drapery,              and she deftly let subside her underclothes              and stood.

‹63›

This Power This power we don’t define it Mother, your rooted garden Mother, I address you as if you had dignity running with shopping bags through the litter of a city bargain hunting defying poverty Mother, your folders of secret poems Mother, your boyish energy rheumatic fever struck you in your childhood, anemia, shivering I am taller than you, two inches why are you dancing and whistling Mother, fish in your giant tank Mother, scars puckering your skin reading The Grapes of Wrath to me aloud both of us weeping, hugging old earth trying to open trying to feel the sun   this power   as once I held   my children on my shoulders   one after the other   in a swimming pool   and they jumped, they flew   off me, and made a good splash   and I fell back, into the water, welcoming   this is the way we played one afternoon.

‹64›

Dr eam a woman oliveskinned like an Indian brownhaired like a European crouches over a stool               in a green room she is in labor, she is giving birth comfortable, she rides with this work for hours, for days                  for the duration of this                            dream

‹65›