Mirror, Mirror, and: Sweeping Up, and: Envy, and: Covenant, and: Private Lives, and: The Gift, and: Trespass

Abstract

Mirror, Mirror The body I strip in the bedroom mirror is my mother's body, the one I found so hopeless (she could read it in my face) when I was fifteen. True, the breasts are better, the gloating nipples still rosy and erect, but the stomach's the same tired pudding, and those spider veins on the thigh. Stand up straight. Tie your hair back. Don't give me that look. She was fifty, undressing; I was trying on her satin, chiffon, gold lamé America. That was the year I was a bookish girl from Russia who refused to wear lipstick. [End Page 77] Things are easier between us lately. She's not so carping. Is even willing to listen. One would almost think death has mellowed her. On my dresser, a photo of her at eighty, tilting her head, leaning forward – the better to see my life? Her assessor's eye is shrewd but genial. She has something crucial to tell me but she's taking her own sweet time. Sweeping Up The war is over, mama, and the field lies in a litter of aftermath – teacup and tablecloth, Nitrostat, lipstick, the new Danielle Steele, your misspelled DO NOT RESOSITATE, the ordinary disorder. I am your custodian, I am left to sweep up the leavings. I have given the sofa away, but the dishes are still in the basement, the rosebud dishes I'll never use. Your letters are fading in the interrogative light of day, a harsh light that bleaches like peroxide. [End Page 78] Tell me, mama: that amber ring you bestowed with such munificence – did you know it was glass? What if we'd talked about the life after tea – and – mandelbroyt, where would that have taken us? Did you ever find out if I was your child? Your floral nightgown, the one you hemmed in a hurry with crooked stitches – it fits, mama; I'm wearing it. I keep choosing to wear it. Tell me, mama, what have you taken with you that I might have used? Whatever it is, I keep looking. The way a broom reaches sideways under a sofa drags out the dusty small change. Envy And then Naomi died and became available to us. "But did she know?" We sit in a circle and take her life in our hands. The silky feel of her secrets: "She wanted a child, she even – ." [End Page 79] "Damned if I don't fight," she swore on the clanking machine of a bed. That oath had to hack its way out of her throat but I envied the way she said it. She wanted to run downstairs, pare an apple, dip her spoon in the sauce. She wanted to wipe her own ass and tie her shoelaces. And I, of sound body and greedy heart – I envied the way she said it. "Rub my shoulders with cologne?" She pointed at the ancient bottle of Jean Naté, citron yellow beside the purple asters, a little still life on the bedside table. I swabbed her with long sweet lemon strokes, a ritual washing of the body this side of death. When I finished, she looked almost happy. She had only a few wishes left by then, each one smaller than the last. [End Page 80] Covenant What we are given is too hot to touch. Live coal, glowing from the altar. I take it in the tongs of language so it won't burn. It does burn. I reach for it anyway. But slowly. Slowly. The poem is a miracle of perversity. It knows before I do how words give even as they take away. How they slake and inflame. How they salt every morsel they save. I leave a place at the table for the prophet who pressed that burning coal to my lips. Private Lives I know a man who...