My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy

carrion even on the highway
    hates to rise and flap off, wants to continue
    feasting on what it has let down upon
    folding the tent of its broad dusty wings.
    That I like to conquer chaos one square
    at a time like a board game.
    That I fear the sins of omission more
    than commission. That the whining saw
    of the mill of time shrieks always in my ears
    as I am borne with all the other logs
    forward to be dismantled and rebuilt
    into chairs, into frogs, into running water.
    All lists start where they halt, in intention.
    Only the love that is work completes them.

Going into town in the storm
    The sky is white and the earth is white
    and the white wind is blowing in arabesques
    through us. The world wizens in the cold
    to a circle that stops beyond my mittens
    outstretched on which the white froth
    still dissolves. Up, north, left—
    all are obliterated in the swirl.
    The only color that exists clings to
    your face, your coat, your scarf.
    We ride the feathered back of a white goose
    that flies miles high over the Himalayas.
    Where yesterday houses stood of neighbors,
    summer people, scandals still smouldering—
    heaps of old tires that burn for days—
    today all is whited out, a mistake
    on a typed page. My blood fizzes in my cheeks
    like a shaken soda waiting to explode.
    Into any haven we reach we will carry
    a dizziness, a blindness that will melt
    slowly, a sense of how uneasily we inhabit
    this earth, how a rise or drop of a few degrees,
    a little more water or a trifle less, renders
    us strange as brontosaurus in our homeland.
    We are fitted for a short winter and then spring.
    We stagger out of the belly of the snow
    plucked of words naked and steaming.

The clumsy season
    I keep cutting off bits of my fingers or banging
    my knee hard. I am offering pain and blood
    like a down payment on myself withheld.
    Don’t leave me because I am wasting words,
    pissing them out like bad wine swallowed
    that leaves the skull echoing and scraped.
    Don’t let the words rise up and leave me
    like a flight of dissatisfied geese.
    I am waters waiting to be troubled again.
    I am coming back and I will enter quiet
    like a cave and crouch with my knees drawn up
    till you birth me into squabbling bliss.
    I promise to relearn stillness like a spider.
    I will apprentice myself to pine trees.
    I will study the heron waiting on one foot.
    Only do not leave me empty as the skin
    the snake has cast on the path, ghostly
    colors fading and the sinuous hunter gone.
    Fill me roaring with your necessary music.
    Loose upon me your stories screaming for life,
    ravenous as gulls over a fishing boat.
    Or send the little dreams like gnats into my hair.
    Tease me with almost vision, flashes, scents
    that dangle barbs into the dark currents
    of memory. Use me however you will but
    use me. These little accidents are offerings
    to that Coming never accidental.

Silk confetti
    Apple blossom petals lay on asphalt
    fallen from the tree at the road’s turn
    white as the flesh of the apple
    will be, flushed pink
    with the same blush
    tender and curved as cheeks;
    soft on hard; soon
    to be bruised to vague stains.
    Our best impulses often drop so
    and vanish under traffic. We will
    not know for months
    if they bore fruit.

And whose creature am I?
    At times characters from my novels swarm through me,
    children of my mind, and possess me as dybbuks.
    My own shabby memories they have plucked and eaten
    till sometimes I cannot remember my own sorrows.
    In all that I value there is a core of mystery,
    in the seed that wriggles its new roots into the soil
    and whose pale head bursts the surface,
    in the dance where our bodies merge and reassemble,
    in the starving baby whose huge glazing eyes
    burned into my bones, in the look that passes
    between predator and prey before the death blow.
    I know of what rags and bones and clippings
    from frothing newsprint and poisonous glue
    my structures are built. Yet these creatures
    I have improvised like