Peacock, Molly 1947–

PERSONAL:

Born June 30, 1947, in Buffalo, NY; immigrated to Canada, 1992, naturalized citizen (dual citizenship), 2006; daughter of Edward Frank and Pauline Peacock; married Jeremy Benton, 1970 (divorced, 1976); married Michael Groden, August 19, 1992. Education: State University of New York at Binghamton, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1969; Johns Hopkins University, M.A. (with honors), 1977.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Agent—Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary Management, 12 W. 19 St., 2nd Fl., New York, NY 10011; Hilary McMahon and Bruce Westwood, Westwood Creative Artists, 94 Harbord St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6, Canada. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

State University of New York at Binghamton, director of academic advising, 1970-73, coordinator of innovational projects in office of the dean, 1973-76; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, honorary fellow, 1977-78; Delaware State Arts Council, Wilmington, poet-in-residence, 1978-81; Friends Seminary, New York, NY, learning specialist, 1981-92; One-to-One poetry consulting, 1990—; Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, poet-in-residence, 1993-94. Visiting lecturer at YMCA, New York, 1986—, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, 1986, 1988, Columbia University, 1987, Barnard College, 1989-90, New York University, 1989, and Sarah Lawrence College; writer-in-residence, University of Western Ontario, 1995-96; Spalding University, graduate faculty member; actor in her one-woman play of poems, The Shimmering Verge.

MEMBER:

Poetry Society of America (president, 1989-94), Writers' Union of Canada.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Resident at MacDowell Colony, 1975-76, 1979, 1982, 1985, 1989, and Yaddo Colony, 1980, 1982; awards from Creative Artists Public Service, 1977; award from Ingram Merrill Foundation, 1981; New York Foundation for the Arts award, 1985, 1990; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1990; Lila Wallace Fellowship, 1994; Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 1995.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

And Live Apart, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1980.

Raw Heaven, Random House (New York, NY), 1984.

Take Heart, Random House, 1989.

Original Love, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

Understory, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

(Editor, with others) Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2002, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Georgianna Orsini and Robert Phillips) An Imperfect Lover, Cavankerry Press, 2002.

The Second Blush, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2008.

OTHER

Paradise, Piece by Piece (memoir), Putnam (New York, NY), 1998.

How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 1999.

(Editor) The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2001.

Contributing editor, House and Garden magazine, 1996. Also contributor to journals, including Shenandoah, Mississippi Review, New Letters, Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ohio Review, Paris Review, New Yorker, Nation, and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS:

American poet Molly Peacock uses strong rhyme schemes, skillful alliteration, and biting humor to explore such themes as fate, family, sexuality, pain, and the many facets of love. Writing in the Washington Post Book World, David Lehman observed that "Peacock has a luxuriantly sensual imagination—and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy … to bemused reflection…. Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of her baton." Annette Allen, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, commented on Peacock's poetic structures, stating that "Peacock's skillful wielding of form ensures a continual dialectic between the inner world of memory and feeling and the external world. She accomplishes this dynamic, the balance between inner and outer worlds, by employing sound patterns that keep the poem close to unconscious rhythms and by using images or metaphors from the civilized and the natural worlds."

Peacock's first collection, And Live Apart, introduces her preoccupation with the past. Instead of employing a bitter or hostile approach, Peacock views her personal history from the enlightened perspective of one who has reconciled herself to its shortcomings. Robert Phillips noted in Hudson Review that Peacock's "concerns are big ones: the separations we make between one another, the reversals of love, the inescapability of fate, inevitabilities of inheritance, a concern for the language of emotion in conversation." He went on to say that And Live Apart "is notable for plumbing the past without sentimentality, and for finding new solutions to old dilemmas."

Raw Heaven, which received wider critical attention, stresses the manipulative aspects of desire and the ineffable quality of sex and sensuality. In the poem "Desire," for example, Peacock compares sexual yearning to a pet's constant demands for affection. Several critics expressed admiration for her vivid, illuminating imagery, elegant rhymes, and bold consideration of such taboo topics as menstruation, childbirth, and masturbation. Boston Review critic Matthew Gilbert observed: "What makes this book a ‘drive for what is real,’ even more than her forceful longings, is Peacock's devotion to the strength of vision. She reveres the power of uninhibited perception, imagining herself as one daring to witness the world." Some reviewers, however, criticized what they considered Peacock's overabundant use of wordplay, rhyme, and the sonnet form. J.D. McClatchy noted in New York Times Book Review that Peacock's "wordplay, so high-spirited, is often aimless," while Christopher Benfey observed in Parnassus that "her rhymes—and these sonnets are relentlessly rhyming—are rarely part of the sense of the poem, nor are they particularly adept."

In Take Heart, Peacock continues to address inviolable topics, including the horrors and repercussions of physical and mental child abuse. Many of the volume's opening poems deal with the death of Peacock's father and her childhood memories of his alcoholism. Several critics praised her ability to illuminate universal concerns through intimate memories. In "Say You Love Me," for instance, her drunken father's aggressive demand for her unconditional love evolves into a study of humanity's need for acceptance and reassurance. Similarly, "Buffalo"—in which Peacock harshly recollects waiting in bars while her father drank—becomes a condolence for the bartenders who "shrink / from any conversation to endure / the serving, serving, serving of disease." Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Ian Gregson noted: "Peacock is conspicuously courageous in the subjects she is willing to tackle. The [reason] she's mostly successful in doing so in Take Heart … is because she's discovered a technique that meticulously follows the labyrinthine twists and turns of these emotional tangles."

Peacock begins to move away from more formally structured verse in Original Love. In this work, as Frank Allen stated in Library Journal, she addresses "the boundaries between men and women, mother and daughter, and one's mind, body, and senses." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly also noted that Peacock uses "explicit eroticism" to explore "three loves—for lover, mother, self." Like her other works, Original Love directly and unrelentlessly examines such subjects as sexuality, desire, death, and human fallibility. Regarding Peacock's work as a whole, Allen observed: "The intelligence and music of her work, the belief in exploring consciousness with honesty, the sheer beauty of the language—all contribute to the ‘pleasure of the text.’ Because all the pain and joy of living are in [Peacock's] poetry, people will continue to turn to her poems."

Peacock published her memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece in 1998. In it she outlines her difficult childhood and the way her father's alcoholism tore at the family base. She also shows how by escaping that unpleasant place in her life, she was able to develop as a poet. She also discusses her decision to not have children. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman noted that "Peacock's lucid prose is as honest and precise as her poems." Mary Paumier Jones, writing in Library Journal, remarked that "she speaks with candor, humor, and insight on her topic."

In 1999 Peacock published How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle. This book seeks to assist those interested in reading poetry to use a structured approach in order to better understand it. Reviews for the instructional book were mostly positive. A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that "Peacock sets a wonderfully idiosyncratic example for responding to poetry." In Booklist, Seaman concluded that "her lucid interpretations provide a welcoming introduction to the art of reading poetry, and her suggestions for forming a poetry circle are meant to encourage poem-struck readers to articulate and share their passion."

The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, published in 2001, is a collection of essays on the values placed on privacy in the age of reality TV and daily celebrity exposés. The collection includes contributions from Jonathan Franzen, Dorothy Allison, and Kathleen Norris, Barbara Feldon, and Evans D. Hopkins. Reviews, however, were mixed. Mark Bay, writing in Library Journal, complimented the writing style, but commented that the essays "offer little real sociological substance and consequently are of little research value." Writing in Lip, Suzanne Cody concluded, "This excellent overall collection reminds us that personal boundaries are important, that there is a difference between desiring privacy and harboring secrets."

Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2002 brings together many of Peacock's best poems from earlier collections with a few new poems added in. As the poems included are among her most celebrated, reviews for the collection were positive. Seaman, again writing in Booklist, remarked that "there's a delicious tang to Peacock's vital poems." James Beschta, writing in Kliatt, stated: "At her best, her wide-reaching domestic subject matter dominates the poems to the point that poetic convention becomes transparent or invisible."

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:

Molly Peacock contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:

Two girls, fourteen and eleven, eat the dinner the older one has cooked as the July shadows lengthen on all the suburban lawns. School is long over and won't begin again for equally as long. They are deep into the green barbarity of a childhood summer. They listen to the swish of each car as it slows down so that the children playing baseball in the street have time to disperse, and each slowing down causes them a prick of anxiety because it might be their father's car. The later it becomes the more certain it is that he will he

drunk, but what he will do is not certain. They have the dinner heating on the stove, drying out in the pans. They eat with a mix of summer doldrums and a kind of haste to finish before he comes. Then they won't have to eat with him. The day is long; it's still light out. The littler one puts her dishes in the sink and goes out to play baseball. The older one does the dishes, washing the knives first, just as her mother told her, then continuing on with the rest. "Dry those knives and put them in the drawer before your father gets home. Never leave a knife out, Molly."

Molly is obedient. Molly is good. She never leaves a knife out. Molly is not obedient or good because of her fierce moral fiber, but because she is frightened her father might kill her. Her mother has said that her father might do this. That's why she has to put the knives away. Wash them first. She slops through the suds, the scatter rug below the sink is drenched. The parakeet squawks in its cage. The sun hangs lower in the sky. This time when the sounds of the baseball players disperse, the car wheels into her own driveway. She drops the plate back into the dishwater, grabs the towel, and immediately wipes the knives. She pushes them into the drawer, shuts the drawer, and turns around. "Hi, Dad. Dinner's on the stove. Want to eat?"

She says this before she looks at his face. It is rough-red as a piece of ham. "No, I don't want nothin' to eat," the face says. The arm of her father picks up the saucepan full of creamed corn drying out on the burner from being set continually on "Low." The arm of her father flings the pan of corn at the wall. The dull creamed corn drips down the pink kitchen wall.

"You don't have to have corn, Dad. I made you some pork chops."

"Don't want no pork chops!" The workshirted arm of her father picks up the iron frying pan from the big burner on "Low."

"Dad! Don't throw it!"

He doesn't throw it.

Remember what you said just now, Molly thinks to herself, and remember how you said it. The timing. Remember how you got him not to throw the pan. Maybe you can do it again. Get him not to throw the pan when his arm grabs it like that. While she is organizing these thoughts in her mind, he has gone to the corner cabinet.

In the corner cabinet is a lazy Susan filled not with food or dishes but with files of receipts for the quarterly taxes of Peacock's Superette. Pink and yellow receipts, hundreds of them, clipped together, rubber banded, stuck in between other receipts, notebooks, little pads with columns of figures, and rolls of adding machine paper with columns of figures.

As the arm of her father opens the corner cabinet and whirls the lazy Susan faster and faster, the receipts come flying out. But they don't fly fast enough. The arm of her father, both arms of her father start grabbing the receipts and hauling them down onto the counter, then onto the floor. The kitchen is awash in receipts. Some stick to the creamed corn on the pink walls, some fall into the frying pan with the chops on the stove.

The frying pan, she thinks. I should have let him throw the pan. Next time, remember to let him throw the pan. Remember. Don't say anything. Let him throw it.

Because this is worse.

The side doorbell rings.

Molly ignores it. Her father is swearing, "Fuck the store! Don't want no dinner!" And mumbling, "Fuckin' shit, fuckin' bitch." He wades through the receipts toward the kitchen table. All this time his daughter has been moving around the kitchen, keeping at a safe distance. She makes no move to clean anything up. If she began to clean it up she'd have to turn her back. And if she turned her back, he might kill her. She watches in fascination at the destruction. Her father's legs lumber him toward her. She backs up. He turns toward the kitchen table. The doorbell rings again. Her father is still swearing. He plants his legs as two columns. His arms grab the tabletop and tip it over. Salt, pepper, napkins, and her father's place setting fly off the table. She's glad she cleaned up the other dishes. And put away the knives.

Now her father is down on his knees, bracing them against the upside down table, and using his powerful arms to wrench off the table legs one by one. It is a solid hardwood table. She has learned about adrenaline from the pediatrician who has treated her numerous allergies. Suddenly she thinks, what amount of adrenaline is coursing through him now? The doorbell rings again. He continues swearing, "Cunt, cunt," and methodically braces himself to break the last table leg. She backs into the foyer and closes the kitchen door just before her father takes a table leg and beats it like a club against the tabletop on the floor.

It is a neighbor girl at the side door. "Wanna come out and hang around, go to the drugstore?" It is the girl with cigarette burns on her legs she says are mosquito bites she scratched and made worse. Molly looks down. She still has a dishtowel in her hand. Behind the door her father grunts as he methodically beats the table. His workbooted feet make a swishing sound as he moves through the flimsy carpet of receipts. How much can she hear? What would she make of it?

"I can't. Go with you. I …" Molly trails off. "I …," think of something normal she tells herself, think of a regular excuse, what regular parents do to normal kids. "I'm grounded," she says almost enthusiastically as she finds her normal lie. "I've got to stay in and do the dishes. He's making me." Imagine, doing something dumb and wrong and normal, and then getting punished, and then having it be over, she thinks.

Behind the kitchen door it's over temporarily. No grunts, no swearing. Then, "Molly," he growls, "get in here and clean up this goddamn mess."

"You see? Lookit, I've gotta go."

"Yeah. Well, see ya."

Inside Molly looks at her father with every ounce of censure she can muster. "Oh Dad, what's Mommy going to say?"

"Don't worry about your mother. I'll worry about your mother. Get into your room. I'll clean this up." Now he is pale and repentant. She knows he won't do anything more, like follow her into her room and start breaking things there. He is ashamed and cleans it up by himself.

After he leaves for Peacock's Superette, Molly creeps out to the kitchen. She thinks of calling the neighborhood girl, but stays in the kitchen instead, then goes into the living room to watch TV. The kitchen floor and walls are clean, the receipts somehow piled back into the corner cabinet. Of course the knives were put away earlier. She had seen to that. And he hadn't broken the chairs. Four hard maple chairs are lined up against the wall, waiting, a bit like a police lineup.

It is far too dark to play baseball now. The kids outside are playing a flashlight game. Then parents begin to call them in, so her sister comes home. The kitchen lights are ablaze, but Molly sits in the dark in the liv- ing room with only the light of the TV. "Hey, Mol, what happened to the table?" Gail asks. "I saw Dad dragging the pieces out to the garbage."

"He broke it. He broke up the table. He threw his dinner at the wall and broke the table."

"Jesus. Lookit those chairs lined up—they look like Goldilocks and the three bears," her sister says in awe.

Later their mother arrives. "What the hell happened to the kitchen table?"

"Dad broke it."

"No wonder he was such a lamb at the store," her mother says.

Even though I have told this episode countless times to friends, in therapy, and used parts of it in my poetry, I could not write it here in the first person. The only way I could tell it was to make myself and Gail and my father characters in a story.

"What happened here?" my mother asked the next morning when she opened the door to the cabinet where all the receipts were shoved in disorder.

"Dad. He did it when he broke the table."

My mother didn't ask me to tell her more about it, nor did I volunteer. She simply took in the information, groaned, and started reorganizing the receipts. "This will take me a week," she muttered. She did not say he was wrong, she did not say it was his disease, she did not say she was sorry I had to be there during it all, but neither did she wholly deny it happened. She treated it like a horrible fact of life, a hurricane you had to clean up after. I had no sense at all that change in my family was possible.

Sometimes the difference between how I see my life and how others see it is the matter of my skin. Of course, others see it as the border of my body, as anybody else's skin is the boundary between them and the world. But I have often seen my skin as permeable. And sometimes I have felt that I do not have a

skin at all. At these times anybody in the world has access to me. I do not feel separate from them. This means that during those times I have found myself in a state of continuous empathy with other people. This empathic state puts me in danger of losing my self because I am attending so closely to the needs of someone else. Well into my thirties I struggled to have an identity, to have a form or shape to my life which seemed constantly to be bleeding into—or being bled by—others.

Many people, especially many women, have felt this sensation, but I felt it all the time as a teenager and as a young woman. The identity crisis that adolescents usually undergo, the questions of Who am I? and What constitutes me? were kept alive in my life. I carried far too many responsibilities to say I was in an extended state of adolescence, but there was a certain adolescent pain, the psychic growing pain, present all the time.

Years later, having to support myself as a poet, I entered a profession which requires one of the highest levels of sustained human nurturance outside of actual nursing: I became a learning disabilities specialist. The permeable skin I had allowed me to identify with the children I tried to help. These students had trouble processing language. The permeable skin also became part of my identity as a poet. It gave me an understanding of the world from the inside out.

I knew quite early I was engaged in a survival struggle, but I felt I would be alone in it, as alone as each person in my family was. It was not until I was twenty-seven, nearly twenty years ago, that I realized I could ask for help. It was my good fortune to ask for this help from Joan Stein, a psychotherapist so attuned to me that I have been able, over the years, to integrate the many aspects of me that were born and developing along, much like a healthy family of various dimensions inside me. The process of psychotherapy, what the British analyst Adam Phillips calls a "theory of censorship" (and means by this, I think, the development of ways to lift the pressure of the many internal censors our family life and growing personalities attempt to impose on us), has allowed the births and rebirths of these aspects of me, and has allowed me to see their shape, my boundaries.

For ten years (1947-1957) we lived in the duplex in Buffalo, New York, with my grandparents, then, when they retired, sold the duplex and moved to a small pink-and-white suburban house in Tonawanda, north of Buffalo. But the mortgage payments were crippling, not to mention finding the money for the cases of beer and cartons of cigarettes necessary to keep our new nuclear family afloat. My dad, Ted (Edward Frank Peacock), began to work two jobs, his regular job at the electric company, driving the truck with a huge yellow lift to repair downed wires, and a night job pumping gas in a service station a few blocks away. Anticipating my father's breaking point, my mother found a way of taking care of all of us financially, eliminating the gas station job, and getting the beer and cigarettes at cost.

What my mother, Pauline (Pauline Ruth Peacock, née Wright), found to do was to emulate her own father. My grandfather Gilbert Wright's general store and Esso station (which stood at a crossroads in the orchard country of rural upstate New York called LaGrange)—with its secret peephole to spy for gypsies and the miracles of its wooden shelves of fudge bars, soda pop, clothespins, flour, oil, auto parts—fascinated all its customers, including the regulars, my grandfa-

ther's cronies, a group of pipe-smoking farmers in bib overalls. Pauline convinced Ted to borrow money from his credit union to start a business: PEACOCK'S SUPERETTE. The Superette, a low cement building next to a liquor store on a main road between Buffalo and Niagara Falls, had none of the slow conviviality of LaGrange Garage. The Superette sported metal shelves, not brightly painted wooden ones, and cement floors with rows of coolers stocked with brown pint bottles and green quart bottles and flimsy aluminum cans of beer and ale.

The new arrangement Pauline constructed was that Ted would come home from his job at four, I would make him dinner, iron his shirt, and send him off to the store. There he would relieve her, so that she could come home and eat dinner. Gail and I were to come home alone from school and do our homework until the dinner I made was ready. I was to supervise my sister's homework. This was to be the clockwork, weekday routine. On weekends Pauline and Ted were to alternate shifts at the store.

Pauline would cook on Sundays. Now this is an extreme schedule for any family. The burden on my mother from her two jobs of house and store, on my father from his two jobs, on me from the two jobs of school and house, and on my sister from the job of

school as a learning disabled child and home with a smartypants older sister who hated her mothering role all weigh so heavily in the mere description that it is exhausting for me to imagine it. Now add alcoholism.

Twelve- and thirteen-year-old humans are some of the frailest animals alive. I spent ten years of my life watching them, first as a teacher, then as a learning disabilities specialist. It is a truism among teachers that the age you teach is the age of your greatest personal crisis. Having worked with hundreds of girls and boys of the age at which I began my life as a false wife and false mother, I can say with verified sadness that no matter how adult such adolescents appear, they are not adults, but in a tunnel of travel into adult consciousness. However successful I am as a poet, or as a teacher, or even simply as an adult, there is an ever-decreasing but still apparent part of me frozen in that tunnel, for I was not allowed to traverse it in my own time or in my own skin.

Three years of high school without change in fear, or vigilance. Sometimes the fear abates, but it never completely leaves. Sometimes I turn my attention elsewhere, but a part of me never removes my attention from the possible source of danger, which isn't only my father, but Ted and Gail and Pauline and myself in four strands of color that wind and wind. Of course the changes of growth and degeneration occur, but these aren't clear to me. My father's alcoholism degenerates. His daughters' sexuality accelerates. His wife's depression deepens. Everybody gains weight, except Gail. Either food or drink fills us up, but danger fills her up.

"I'm going out with this great guy tonight," Gail whispers over the minute steaks I've burned. "Don't tell Mom, Molly, you're always such a tattletale." I was a tattletale; she was right. "He's coming over at seven and we're going to go to the Falls." Niagara Falls was not within walking distance.

"How old is this guy? Does he drive a car?" I say incredulously.

"Sure he drives. He's nineteen. He goes to night school, isn't that cool?"

"Cool," I say, nonplussed.

"He was at the JV basketball game. He likes basketball."

"Likes basketball?"

"Yeah, but Molly, don't tell Mom, what he really likes is cars. He likes to drive 'em."

"Cars?"

My sister was a JV cheerleader. I had coached her for hours before the tryouts. I hadn't been chosen as a cheerleader, but like a teenage stage mother I'd decided that my Gail should rectify my inabilities and mistakes. And so I'd hounded and nagged her until she learned a great routine and was honored with a position on the squad. She was too hip, though. She smoked; she never did her homework. I felt I was a shitty mother and worse as a sister. I just couldn't keep an eye on her. When, when, I asked myself, did she become like this?

"Look, I better call Mom," I began, but she mocked me.

"Better call Mo-om," breaking the syllable in two like a saltine.

"The guy's nineteen! He's two years older than I am!" I squawked.

"So who says you have to be the oldest thing around here? This guy is cool. Wait'll you meet him. He knows Mom, too. He hangs out at the store sometimes." The only guys who hung out at the store were dropouts. My mother collected them.

"Keep an eye on your sister," my grandparents often said.

Be vigilant. You can never tell what will happen.

She looked to me as the mother I hated to be. She told the truth to me, more or less. And whatever truth she told increasingly horrified me. She was blonde and sexual and loved danger. Personally, danger left me cold. I'd been in enough of it. I was endangered every night waiting for Ted to come home.

"That's him!" my sister squealed as she heard a muffled noise at the door.

"How could it be him? I didn't hear a car drive up."

I still listened for my father's car in the driveway every night. I listened for how he drove, whether the turn was reckless and the brake was jammed on at the last minute, or whether it was a smooth, pantherlike crawl, the turquoise Chrysler oiled with only a couple of beers. Late, later, after countless shots of whisky with beer chasers, meant either rage at full force, or maybe only a dead sleep, or maybe a few slurred questions tucked around an insult and then the blackout. A couple of beers maybe meant OK, he'd get changed and go to relieve my mother at the store, but it also meant fuller consciousness, questions, where was my sister going, what was I doing, and possible anger. This meant anything could happen.

My sister was unlocking the door and speaking to a figure in the dark she didn't ask into the light of the hallway. She left him standing outside in the cold while she ran for her coat and grabbed the keys to my mother's ancient pink Plymouth that was mysteriously harbored in the rivulet of our driveway. How had my mother gotten to work, anyway?

"You're taking Mom's car?" I was incredulous.

"I told you, Molly, he likes cars. He loves to drive. He's a really great driver, too. We'll he back before they know it's missing."

"Put those car keys on the hook!" I hissed as she swung out the door. She knew I wouldn't tackle her on the front steps. She knew I'd be slightly afraid of the nineteen-year-old boy. She knew I was confused and couldn't decide whether I was her mother or her sister, and she knew I wouldn't tell our mother because I was supposed to he her mother and I failed. And she also knew, somehow, that my mother's car would be there for the taking. The Plymouth wheeled out of the driveway with the wild teenage daughter I couldn't control.

My father came home drunk but obedient to some unknown-to-me command from my mother that he pick her up at the store and bring her home. I said my sister was at her girlfriend's house. Just after he left, my sister came home with my mother's car, and there the two of us sat, watching "Adventures in Paradise," when my parents drove up at 10:30 p.m. I never understood how my mother had gotten to work without a car, how my sister knew this, or how my father understood the arrangement; nor did my parents—unless my mother knew some version of this from my sister—know whom my sister was with and in what vehicle. My family arrangements were often like this. I felt I had all the responsibility, and none of the control. Nothing I kept an eye on stayed still; it vaporized. Yet I had to keep my eye on my sister, and especially on my father. If I took my eyes off him, he might kill me.

Continually my mother reminded me to do the dishes immediately after eating and to put away the knives. "You don't want to give anybody an opportunity," my mother said. "Anybody" meant my father. It took me almost a decade of exposure to other people's lives before what a therapist said to me made sense: "She expected you to be hurt, Molly." And I expected this too.

A spring night in my senior year of high school. My sister out with her friends. I lie on my bed looking at the curtains I've designed and sewn and looking at the two orange heads of Nefertiti I've wedged as bookends for the books of poetry I've begun collecting. I have only a few friends, and they are school friends. If my mother is out when my father is home, I feel I have to stay home as well. It takes me decades to understand I am a substitute, a sacrifice. Then I only thought, if I'm not here, who knows what could happen? I have to stay home, because if I am home I will be able to … prevent … what?

Well, one thing I can prevent is his coming into my room. My bedroom has no door. It is an extension built onto the house through my sister's bedroom. Her room does have a door, but I do not want to lead him to burst through it; therefore I meet him on common ground: the kitchen and the living room. The key is to remain ever watchful. You can never tell when he will come home or what he will do when he gets there. The best tactic is to stay alert and stay away from the things of yours he could destroy.

Every evening is a defensive military maneuver, and I use the tactics of the powerless everywhere: forethought and watchfulness. I also use the good girl tactic, since it is at my disposal. I am the good girl, the obedient one. If I obey perfectly all the instructions, I can trot out obedience in my defense. I can ward off evil with my structure of goodness, of servitude. Oh yes, I am a servant. I serve my family's needs, not out of that desire for connection, not out of that love that makes us long to fulfill the needs of those whom we love, but out of self-defense, a brittle, two-faced cunning that knows the armor of the Good. And it is armor I need, for I have no skin. At best I am "thin-skinned" and sensitive, sensitive because the borders that define me are so frail.

But I have my lessons to do, and I have the phone to talk on to my occasional friends, not about socializing, but about homework and the appalling number of school activities I join. I'm in every club and on every committee. Of course there's nothing to come home for after school, so I don't. There's another reason I join everything. I want to be visible in school. I've never been rushed to a sorority. (How can I have people to my house? Who knows what will happen?) And out of a desire to reaffirm that I can be something other than a nobody, I manage to get myself elected to things, chosen for things. I do the publicity for this and this, make the posters, make the phone calls. I work on the newspaper, on the yearbook. Finally I am chosen editor of the yearbook. Everything looks normal; I am succeeding.

And I am succeeding as the substitute abused wife of my father: I am alive. A spring night here in my room admiring the overstuffed chair I acquired and the cover for the chair my grandmother helped me make and the bedspread she helped me dye to match it, and I listen. I listen for the car in the driveway. Every night for all the years between twelve and eighteen I listen for the car, and often I hope he is dead. I hope he gets into a car accident and dies. I think my father must be the luckiest man in Buffalo. He is the embodiment of the luck of the Irish. How can he be alive when he drives like that? It is about a year since my last try at getting him into Alcoholics Anonymous. I have ended a campaign which begged my mother every morning to leave him and begged him every sober early weekend morning to go to AA. I read him the ten questions from the Buffalo Evening News that if you answer yes to any five you are an alcoholic.

My mother surprised me. She said, "You're hurting your father." Is she crazy? I thought. He's hurting us.

Me. Nothing seemed to change, except the years passing at school. I was going to go to college. I was going to get out of there, to escape a burden that was both very big and very inappropriate. The secrecy surrounding my father's alcoholism hooded every perspective. My mother had found a way of supporting us, but it was also a way of abdicating responsibility as a wife and a mother. I can still touch the anger at her strange abandonment, the lack of love and care that resulted, and that held me in a kind of perpetual pause of growth throughout my teenage years. When I was required during literature classes or during my silly home economics classes to imagine a family, or to imagine what my own future family might be like, I could only picture my present painful one. This picture I looked away from again and again as I tried to make a life as an ordinary human being, though I was not so ordinary. I had a gift for language and a burning desire to use it to understand my life. Therefore, though I tried to turn away from it, in poem after poem I focused on that internalized picture.

No one who knew my mother well actually used her formal name, Pauline. Everyone called her Polly. Polly, as a child, had felt lovingly bonded to her grandmother, Molly. Her mother (my grandmother, Ruth) had named my newborn mother Ruth Isabelle, after herself. Family legend has it that my grandfather simply started calling my mother Polly, and her name was formally changed to Pauline Ruth, dropping the wretched Isabelle. As a girl my mother lived for weeks at a time on the glorious farm with her grandparents, preferring it to the house and general store down the road where her mother was. Her brother was preferred in her parents' household, and Polly was relished by her grandparents, especially Molly, after whom I am named. When she married my father, she became Polly Peacock, a goofy name she feistily defended.

I know the history of these names is confusing—I myself was confused by it as a little girl—but I explain it here because the confusion is so emblematic of the confused identity of the child who shares too intimately a mother's thoughts. There was only one consonant difference between my mother and me, yet I was also her obstacle. I continually felt that if I didn't exist, she somehow would have a better life. How could I, as her child, bear being her obstacle? I could become her mirror. I could reflect to her the assurances she needed to be who she was.

It was a staggering job to return this mirroring, more so because the mirroring my mother did for me was often obscured. Common wisdom says that mothers are supposed to be the mirrors of their children, for in their eyes will be reflected their children's growth and identities. But very often my mother was depressed, so depressed that the mirrors of her eyes were dull, and nearly impossible to see myself in. At these times, my mother read. I sat at her side playing—often reading myself, or writing and drawing—and admonishing myself not to interrupt her, though she tolerated what probably were a stream of interruptions from me. My mother read to escape. And I have often thought that I became a writer in order to have my mother read me. Although it is difficult to develop a positive picture of a family to internalize if the picture your mother draws for you is negative—or at least my own experience has taught me that—my mother's escape, reading, did allow me to develop other ideas of families, because as soon as I could read I loved to read about them.

Polly was an avid reader of westerns and romances. Gail and I teased her about her favorite author, Louis L'Amour, as soon as we found out what amour was. Before she turned to buying paperbacks to read behind

the counter at the Superette, the three of us went weekly to the library. I did everything Pauline did, so I became a reader, too. My learning-disabled sister, hyperactive, unable to focus, did not. My mother and I, swept into fantasy worlds at the drop of a paragraph, had one more reason to see Gail as a foreigner. This was in 1955, thirty years before schools began diagnosing learning disabilities. Pauline's escapist reading began in her own family when she herself was four and learned to read at a one-room schoolhouse, taken there every day on the back of a blind farm horse who knew the way. When her grandparents hooked up their team to their wagon and went to town for weekly supplies, Pauline stayed at the farm to ride her pony but instructed them to bring her back a book.

If I had had grandparents who hitched up a wagon and went to town, I too would have wanted to stay home and be brought a book. To wander bareback on a pony to a riverbank pretending to be this or that, and then to lie, deliciously prone on that riverbank, and get lost in a book: I cannot think of a childhood afternoon more ideal. Very luckily I was invited to spend summers with my mother's parents at the hamlet of LaGrange. A few weeks of each of my own childhood summers were as golden as those my mother described, though my mother's summers grew into apple-picking falls, and I left my grandparents' house to return to Buffalo to resume my roles as a poorly prepared substitute wife and mother. As Polly aged, she often lapsed into stories about her youth and prefaced each story with how wonderful her girlhood was. For her, childhood contained the best moments of life before adulthood went awry. For me, whose life has been so much the opposite, but who had that little taste of what she described and re-described, those stories are clouded in my anger. I heard "Oh, I had a wonderful childhood!" with sharpening rage over the years.

It sounds hyperbolic, but the legacy of childhood reading probably saved my life. My experience of horror—my parents' fights, the terror I felt when the drinking was out of hand and into violence, at the least my parents' voices raised, at the worst my father push- ing my mother down the cellar stairs, my sister and I running to push her back up into safety—led me to separate my experience into what happened "outside" my head and what happened "inside." Inside were fantasies of health and power and control. I was Lola the spy who controlled all (I played Lola privately well into my sophomore year of high school) or I was Mary of The Secret Garden or Jo of Little Women. I developed these fantasies from reading. The voices of authors, the comfort and wisdom and emotion expressed, allowed me to grow internally, secretly, to nurture a hidden self all on my own, the self I would save, the self I would become, unbeknownst to my family, almost unbeknownst to my conscious, practical, adult facade, the outer self I built to bear the burdens of my father's alcoholism and my mother's depression. The voices of those authors parented me. The books I read were my escape, the authors' voices mirrors of my feelings, nurturers of my imagination. All my inner world was yearnings, yearnings for solitude and freedom.

Of course I fantasized I was an orphan, that these parents were really not my own. Perhaps my real parents would come and get me. My fantasy life was composted from the emotional peelings and scraps of my parents' lives put out to rot in the backyard of literature, the weather of literature beating on them, turning them into loam. Although my parents' arguments must have had words, I do not recall them but only remember the achingly wordless non-explanations of their behavior, the silence to my questions, the silencing of my questions, the requirement that I turn inside in order to stay sane, although many children turn inside, split off entirely, and become insane. My imagination, fueled by literature, kept alive an anchored, growing, interior life, one I could articulate to myself because of literary models, models who would save me. The books gave me this gift. But unbeknownst to me I was gifted already. I was imaginative and verbal and, best of all, I was to learn that I could write.

Polly always closed her book and put it carefully away when Ted came home. His entry into the house always threatened disruption. The threat that I felt to my life, even though my father in fact never spanked, hit, or touched me (and in fact rarely hugged or was physically affectionate toward me) had its taproot in my father's threat to my mother's life. Ted was a hysterical nipper of a fighter, biting, darting, then sweating, bashing, and thrashing as my mother's recalcitrance fanned his hysteria into blinder rage. Polly was a growler, growling this or that comment, refusing to up her pitch, keeping a steady negative monotone that refused to react to his emotionalism, fanning it. The ways they expressed themselves completely frustrated their understanding of one another, Polly constantly protecting herself from Ted's emotional fireworks, Ted's need for an ear met instead by her protective resistance. Neither of them ever could change his or her mode.

Bright morning in the Buffalo duplex house. Gail is three and I am six. Daddy comes home after working the graveyard shift. Breakfast. French toast. Sharp rectangular delineations of sunlight on the floor. Playing, eating, unaware of the escalating voices until our mother's usual growl of stubborn annoyance hikes itself into a surprising soprano pitch, and our father's yapping descends to a deep, lung-rattling bass. The hefty Scotty dog I think he's like and the big unflappable setter I think she's like have reversed and become monstrous. They are not like dogs anymore, but like canine horrorsaurs. He is pushing her toward the open cellar door and she is screaming, "Ted, Ted don't do it!" and he is panting, "I'll kill you, you bitch," and as his broad workshirted back blocks the doorway, she is already backing down the cellar stairs. He prods her collarbone with his pointer finger. Then he pushes her again. "Ted, not in front of the kids!" is her signal to us and we run, Gail tiny enough to push between his legs to get to her, me sliding past them on the stairs. Now Gail and I are below them, pushing up against our mother's legs as he pushes down on her. It is a tangle of legs and stairs, his workpants and boots pushing down against her bare calves and slippers, while Gail and I push up against her, trying to hold her up and save her, and in saving her rescue our lives, because he is a monster now, a dragon, faced puffed and red. Her face as she twists toward us is drained an almost painted white. She looks like a geisha girl beneath her black hair. "Ted, watch out! The kids!" she screams, diverting his attention. She is the cunning girl and he is the blustering dragon, brought for a moment to his senses, outwitted because we have diverted him. He backs up the stairs, she follows, we follow her, we are saved, all of us, because of the kids, watch out for them.

The stereotypical Asian images of terrifying maleness in the shape of a red dragon and terrified femininity painted chalk white, ashen in fear, leapt into relief in my mind and seem permanently installed there. I cannot think of him in rage except to recall the dragon, or her except to recall the courtesan, highly stylized images for this Navy boy come home from World War II to work at the electric company and this farm girl come to the city. Even if he seemed like a little terrier and she like a large, long-haired lazy setter, they were a strong man and a weaker woman. He could overpower her. He could kill her. Kill us. Me. Usually the fights were verbal. Physical violence was only hinted at, but because this perennial threat wasn't quite empty, it was always powerful. Only after I escaped to college did I hear, long distance from my dorm room, the stories of increased physical violence, the police, my mother's and sister's fear escalating until they ran away. My parents divorced, and Peacock's Superette was sold, and my father briefly remarried, worked, retired early from countless alcohol-related health problems, and died; my mother finished her working life as a secretary in a hospital, never remarried, then retired and lived a life of glorious solitude until the illness of her last year, carefully budgeting her money to eat an inexpensive lunch out every day with a paperback romance or western in front of her, happy with her book, with the food which she did not have to make, brought to her by a series of solicitous waitresses with waiting coffee pots, and happy with the voice of the author speaking to her, soothing, exciting, engaging, surprising. Now I am an author.

The serious split between an internal safety I struggled to create and preserve and an external atmosphere of verbal suggestions of violence, sharpened my ideas of inner life and public life to a glittering edge. What I truly was I felt could not be revealed at the cost of its death. As a result, no one could really know me. The loneliness this causes is almost unspeakably profound. Anyone who is driven this far inward risks the "not coming back" of serious mental illness, the splitting off of internal and external experience that can become at its worst multiple personalities. But I did not suffer a splitting off from the world so severe. When I think of the circumstances that allowed my escape from extreme illness, of the many individual adults both inside and outside my family who helped me, and of the sheer luck of my physical stamina and intelligence, the circumstance with the most profoundly rescuing shape is art. Since the first time my mother gave me a pencil and scrap paper to occupy myself, I have consistently felt the joy of processing my experiences into pictures and words. As a girl I drew and painted, and as I learned more about language I wrote, and then read. My inner life had a way out. I did not have to hold my spirit prisoner. Many times throughout my young life I imagined myself in prison, without pencil or paper. I practiced for this deprivation by imagining writing in my head and memorizing it. I was determined for my gift to save me, even if I became deprived of its instruments.

Gail next door at Grandma's, Daddy far away at work, Mommy reads her library book settled deep in a red upholstered chair with doilies on the arms to cover the cigarette burns. Mommy wears Daddy's dark green T-shirt without a bra and a pair of baggy jeans. Her shiny black hair with its exciting streak of gray to the left of her widow's peak is pushed back from her cream-white forehead. The wall behind her is green, dark as the forest green of the T-shirt. It is 1952. I am five. She is thirty-three. No woman on Gunnell Avenue in Buffalo, New York, goes braless, wears jeans, buys red chairs and puts them in deep green rooms, then sits down to read a library book, popping an occasional chocolate-covered cherry into her mouth after she's finished her cigarette. She's whizzed through her housework, the dinner fixings are on the counter. She is alone, alone and happy to be in her own world.

Little mouse at her side, I try to read a letter her mother, my grandmother Ruth in the country, has sent me, but I don't attend school yet and do not know how. I have my pencil and my drawing pad. I am using my inner resources. Mommy doesn't like people who can't sit and be quiet and use their inner resources. But I can't read! In exasperation I poke through the carefully constructed boundary of Mommy's world. "Read it to me, Mom."

"Read it to me, Mom, OK?"

Her hazel eyes are trained on her book.

"Read me Gram's letter, OK?"

After a few verbal tries, I place the letter on top of the open book, and Mommy turns and reads it aloud. I have never gotten a letter before, and this is an interesting thing to have, though I wonder what to do with it now.

"Well, when you get a letter, you write back," Mommy explains.

"OK," I say, picking up my pencil, making stray letter-like lines on the page. But my lines are disappointing. They don't really look like writing.

"Why don't you draw Gram a picture?" Mommy lazily says.

I always draw pictures. Babies draw pictures. "No! I want to write a letter back!"

"Oh, all right, here's the alphabet, Molly." Mommy scrawls the alphabet across the top of the paper. "Now, write DEAR GRAM." She underlines the individual letters. Of course I can't remember the order of "Dear Gram" out of ADEGMR, and I am aware that Mommy has reached her limit, so I do not ask again, but try to figure out for myself how to write them, and after a fashion, I have covered the page in something akin to a personal cuneiform. It is the hardest thing I've ever done. I couldn't be more pleased. And Mommy couldn't be more pleased. I make her smile. I draw a smile from those straight, slightly purplish lips whose carmine lipstick has disappeared to find a better home on the filter tips of cigarette butts in a square glass ashtray, an ashtray so heavy that when my father let it fly against the wall in an argument it didn't even break. Nothing can break the pleasure of this solitude of this afternoon. Like two sides of an open locket, the side that read and the side that wrote to reach the reader, my mother and I lay inside the red and green jewelbox of the afternoon.

The mutual possession of our selves, without the diverting presence of my sister or the inflaming presence of my father, gave me the sense, reinforced by my mother over and over again, that this was how one ought to live. "Everybody should have their own room," my mother would say. "The only way for a family to survive is for each person to have their own room." My mother had never heard of Virginia Woolf. She didn't have a room of her own as an adult until she was nearly fifty years old, divorced, and with her children grown. None of us had rooms to ourselves, and even when my sister and I did, later in a different house, the rooms had no doors. Invasion was always both physically and emotionally possible. My mother's quest for a room became invested in me, and the magnitude of my need for it irrevocably shaped my life—and the lives of the people I've loved, especially the men I've lived (or tried to live) with.

Part of that driven need for a room of my own was to have room for my gift as an artist. I both drew and wrote until I reached high school. I knew I wanted to be "something special" but I didn't know what that special thing was until I got to college and decided, in a very tentative way, to try to become a poet. I know people who have denied their gifts, and I have watched their personalities wizen and shrivel, almost before my eyes, from that denial. My gift was too large, too pleasurable, too life-affirming to deny. It gave me life by ensuring my life. Without it, I would not have survived. I did not know this consciously, but since I first was able to express myself I have guarded that gift with a fierceness I have long heard described as the characteristic protective fierceness of motherhood. I take pleasure in the gift, and, animal-like, claw the mental air at any interference with the tenderness of its growing being.

Sex and babies. Five tiny neighborhood girls all jumping up and down on two of their children's twin beds, squealing and tickling one another in the silky, rabbit warren mess of sheets that smell of childbody sleep thick between the crumpled ridges. Burrow into Gail's bed with the shock of Gailsmell while the others use my bed as a trampoline before Grandma, alarmed at the squawk of the springs, hauls us all downstairs: I stick my finger up my underpants and find the hole, fingersized, see a color in my mind, black/red, bring my finger out and smell it. Ah! The smell of me.

"All right now, all of you girls have to go home after you finish your oatmeal cookies. Come on now, little Diane, let's get a move on." My grandmother Mildred, my father's mother who lives next door to us, has the quality of a businesslike Shetland sheepdog nosing at the heels of the three lambs she ushers out the door. She is glad to sit down. Five girls, ages four to seven, are a handful. But she leans toward me from her chair and puts her arms loosely around me. "Oh you naughty girls! I'll have to make those beds all over again."

"Hey Gram, look what I found," I say, suddenly daring. She has said "naughty" with benign acceptance. I know she thinks we weren't really naughty. I stick my finger up my underpants into my vagina and bring my finger out and thrust it under her nose. "Smell this!"

"Eeewwwhhh!" she exclaims in delight, "what a cupcake smell!" Her eyes glisten with a kind of excitement, surprise, curiosity, and wonder. I search her face

for whether this is all right. I have found the secret place she also knows about, inside the place I pee from. I'm not clear at all about why this is a secret, but it is all right. "Let's go remake the beds," she says, corralling me and Gail up the stairs. I know not to startle my mother in the way that I startled Gram, just the way I know not to use the beds as trampolines, although I think it's fine to use the beds as trampolines quietly not making a disturbance.

Quietly. For all my railing at my mother's abandonment and sometimes downright neglect—one time I was forced to come home from school with a note asking my mother to please get me to brush my teeth—the policy of Quietly, and the unloosed aspect of neglect that was benign, allowed me to be uncivilized, sensuous, a barbarian. This is not the kind of thing that prepares you well for your college interviews, but it created a privacy in which my sexuality was allowed to take its own course. After I learned how to masturbate, I wasn't to be interrupted at it, disturbed in the midst, often questioned, admonished … my sexuality went on burgeoning without direct notice. The neglect that left me in terror, that left me holding the bag of family responsibility, left me in peace and quiet about sex. Along with writing, sex became another healthy, undisturbed part of my life.

When I worked with middle schoolers in English classes, we all enjoyed writing poems about tumbling down birth canals and the voyage from the womb to the outside. The children astonished me with their memories and images of being born: blood, and egg yolks, and pulsations galore, the imagery freshly present for them in a way it was only embedded for me. Being born is a highly contemporary subject for children's poetry. No one would have asked us to write about being born in 1955. One of my oldest friends, Katie Kinsky, a painter, swears she thought women had babies from their armpits because the deodorant commercials of the fifties showed a mysterious statue of the Venus de Milo, camera aimed at the pit of her cut-off arm and the voiceover murmuring about "that place." The language was so veiled she thought that armpits had to be the most secret part of the body.

Because my mother had a cesarean section for my sister, I thought all babies were born that way. It was only when Polly overheard me majestically explaining to Gail how babies were delivered that she corrected me. I was probably eight or nine. I simply couldn't imagine a baby coming out of my vagina, and I was horrified. It would hurt! "Oh, you expand," my mother said. Expand???

I was an angry little girl who almost never directly expressed that anger. My experience of anger was one of blowing up—not exploding, but my whole body blowing up until I was the size of an imaginary sumo wrestler. I could not name this feeling. Only as an adult did I recognize it as anger. At the time when Polly said, "Oh, you expand," I generally experienced my anger as confusion and distortion and being filled like a human balloon. This filling up felt painful and exhausting. It was a perverse pregnancy, a holding in of anger until it grew, and grew. Always having contained my anger, I never had a chance to see it being born, or expressed, and to feel a normal human cycle of being full and being empty.

Sex and babies. To have a baby "out of wedlock" was so terrible there was no worse crime. Manslaughter charges got dropped, prison sentences ended, but having a baby out of wedlock ruined your life forever. I had trouble connecting pregnancy and sex until I was in junior high. I knew you had to have a father in order to have a baby. But somehow I thought "married" conferred "future father" status on a man. However, I learned that there was a terrible danger of being "in trouble," of getting pregnant out of wedlock. I never connected my delight in myself to the sex that led to "in trouble" because I avoided knowing how children came to be and because I never asked questions. (My parents did not like to have to answer them. A child's questions shed an unwittingly bright light on their unhappiness. I grew to be a hyper-involved listener, gleaning the answers to my questions from fragments of phrases and innuendos. But sex was not a fully discussed subject, and I couldn't pick up enough information. Because, as a teenager, I was leery about bringing friends home, I didn't have the intimate conversations with them that might have led to other information.)

One day Gram drove me to see Beryl. I was eight or nine, and she was on a mission of no mercy to Beryl. I was the excuse not to stay long, just enough time to eye the mess Beryl was in and report back to other interested parties. She had had a baby out of wedlock and lived on welfare. To be on welfare was almost as bad as to be in trouble. Beryl was ironing. There probably are people alive now or in the past who don't mind ironing, or who even love it, but I have never met one. (Ironing may be distinguished from many men and women's love of washing and drying laundry, which the lovers of laundry see as a redemptive act. I know no lovers of fresh sheets flapping on the line or shirts resurrected from their final spin who also have this deep affection for ironing.) Beryl was particularly affecting because she had a withered arm which hung at her side when she ironed.

The baby slept rather politely in a wicker laundry basket I myself wouldn't have minded curling up in. I was tired from being dragged from store to store by my tireless, domineering fireball of a grandmother. Beryl lived in welfare housing. This meant that she lived in a kind of barracks where nothing was planted to obscure the cement foundation, the grass was cut down to a yellow stubble, and the screening in the screen door sagged in convexity. This was what happened when you got in trouble. What was worse was that people like my grandmother would come and throw old baby clothes on your ripped davenport and humiliate you with a lot of judgmental questions. My grandmother was someone I could ask questions of and I did a substantial amount of quizzing on the fascinating, horrifying Beryl who was so skinny that her apron—obviously meant for someone who in those days would have been called more "ample"—wrapped around her one and a half times. Her eyes were red, and her hair was thin and frizzy from a home permanent that had gone wrong. "It'll grow out," my grandmother said drily. I would not be Beryl, I decided, although the image of Beryl came to me many times as I stood at the ironing board in our half-finished suburban basement, surrounded by baskets of Ted's, Polly's, Gail's and my rumpled clothes, never taken from the dryer on time. The sheer servitude of that General Electric steam iron that linked me to every housewife, housekeeper, and laundress became so fraught for me that I still can't iron more than three pieces of clothing without feeling pinned by the wings.

"I'm going to marry a collie," I announced to Gram on the way home. Some girls choose horses, some cats, some ballet shoes, and some dogs as emblems of their growing selves. Having chosen dogs for their ability to read emotions, to protect, to adore—all the qualities, alas, that Polly and Ted may have had but could not give to me—and having an encyclopedic bent, I took all the dog books out of the library and tried to memorize all the breeds. (Later, with my country grandmother Ruth in charge, I traipsed the landscape identifying flowers in the same impulse to anchor down the world.) Polly introduced me to Lad, a Dog. I was a goner. From sidewalk booksales to the tiny libraries at the backs of English classrooms I fetched all the Albert Payson Terhune dog novels and ate them, then ate them again. God bless him for having written so many, especially what I remember as the incomparable Unseen, which gives us both romance and dogs.

As I watched the "Lassie" family on TV, despising that horrible sap of a boy Lassie rescued week after week but loving the farm life and the gentle goddess-like understanding of June Lockhart, the boy's mother, I reached the point of tears. (Oh, little girl who wouldn't let herself cry over the loss of what she wondered whether she deserved anyway….) I did not cry at the program, knowing I would fail my mother's standard of appropriate toughness, though I would have liked to have cried, and if Gail had punched me then or if I had been injured in fake play, I would have used the opportunity to cry. The program, as the novels did, gave me a way to envision a safe life. Many people rail at the perfected, inhumanly bland vision of

the fifties' television family, but it was a comfort to me. I knew it was not real. Real was home. But the kindness the "Lassie" parents showed for their son and the dog, as well as the gravely fierce kindness the dog showed toward the boy, showed me kindness by displaying behavior I didn't often get to see.

Animals for girls, and certainly for women poets from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop, become a form of natural identity, identity in its unhampered state, greedy, unsocialized, an essential nature accepted simply, not transformed into the posture of continuous giving-unto-others that girls and women often must assume. I wished I could be a dog. I wished I could have a dog to recognize the essential me with its knowing eyes, just as Blake looks into the Tyger's eyes. The combination of the kindness of the family and the protection, adoration, and recognition of the dog caused such a longing for another life to well up in me that I nearly cried. I was seven years old. Would I get what I wanted? Now I had a new answer to those awful, awful questions adults always asked me, "Who are you going to marry when you grow up? And how many children will you have?"

"Lassie," I would say, "I'm going to marry Lassie." (But how would I ever meet such a celebrity as Lassie? Did such animals come to Buffalo? Also, Lassie would be dead by the time I needed to get married. I had heard there were replacement Lassies, a ghastly fact I could barely assimilate….) Becoming more realistic, I would simply reply, "A collie, I am going to marry a collie." There on the windswept moor I would stand with my husband, a big, big collie with its foreleg casually, protectively, but not remotely possessively, around my shoulder. "So what kind of children are you going to have with a dog?" the adults asked, then answered their own question with, "Puppies!"

"Maybe we'll have puppies," I'd announce, then say more primly, "or we won't have anything. You can't have children with a dog." In this wish for my doghusband was a wish for cherished protection as well as a fair certainty that no progeny would come from the union. But I never got as far as imagining doing it with a dog. What was doing it, anyway? Oh, if only my parents could be dogs. Oh, to be a feral child, brought up by wolves!

"Maybe we should get a dog," I recently said to my husband who has two cats who have come to include me in their sphere of interest. "What kind of dog?" Mike says. "Oh, I don't know," I say cagily. "Do you have a favorite kind?" "A small one," Mike says. Not a collie. Oh, well, I'm years and years beyond collies. Forty years. "What kind of a small one?" "A miniature collie. I like those dogs."

I did not marry this man by accident. I married him by design, although the design took thirty years and two countries, and became so vast and intricate it shaped our lives in ways only experience and greater forces could be responsible for. I am only responsible for the first move, a move I made in high school, long after I abandoned the fantasy of a collie for a husband, but not very long at all after I surrendered a fantasy about my father that I knew was entirely untrue but wanted so hard to believe I spoke it as true.

The little girl who said the cigarette burns on her legs were infected mosquito bites, the one who came to the door while my father was tearing off the hardwood maple table legs, grew up to become a creep in high school who had not been rushed to a sorority. I too had not been rushed, but I resolved to escape creep-hood, and did this by being yearbook editor, the keeper of the records of what everybody was, and by organizing activities, and by, as Polly put it as she sipped her instant Maxwell House and ate a peanut donut, "not being a sheep." Really, I would have adored being a sheep if I could have just got on sheep's clothing, but I could not, and so with the Creepette I walked home.

I had nothing but contempt for her, who looked up to me and believed every word I said, just like a little sister except she was my own age. But by the time I reached my sophomore year, I didn't have a single real friend. All the phone calls and checking in to see if we had gotten our periods yet that charged my group of girlfriends in junior high were gone. The years of friends squealing on the couches of our living rooms were long, long over. I was not in a sorority as my former friends were, and I had no group but those artificial clubs institutionalized by the school. I could not invite anyone home, even the Creepette. By my junior year I especially could not ask her, to whom I had lied, lied horribly and unconsciously.

"I hate my father," Creepette said as we trudged through the ice of an unshoveled sidewalk, thrown shoulder to shoulder. "He drinks too much beer. He's mean to my mother. He's not like your father. I know how much you like your father. I know how nice he is to you, Molly. You probably don't even understand how I could hate my father so much."

Absolutely stunned, I stammered, "Well my father isn't that nice."

"I know he like brings you presents and stuff, like when he comes back from business trips and everything."

BUSINESS TRIPS! Oh God, how much had I lied? My lies were being presented to me as truth! When had I uttered them? When had I articulated my fantasy?

My mother dies. My sister is sent away. My father stops drinking, becomes an executive, and buys a penthouse apartment where I keep house for him, waiting in glorious solitude above downtown Buffalo, the traffic spinning below me, reading on our charcoal gray sectional couch surrounded by our shell pink walls for him to come home.

How much had I actually told her? Carefully, I question her. I refer to my mother and the store. She nods. OK, I didn't tell my mother was dead. I mention my sister. She talks about her sister. OK, sister here, not sent away. I say I'm going home. To Pilgrim Road.

"Where the hell do you live but on Pilgrim Road?" the Creepette snorts. She is tired of this ridiculous conversation. She only thinks my father is kind and doesn't drink. Well, that was the main part of the fantasy anyway. Like urine spreading through the seat of my pants, the realization, fast, warm, embarrassing and untellable, spread through my consciousness: I had fantasized, and I had told. I couldn't distinguish reality from fantasy. I was crazy. I had lied. My father drank. He was mean to my mother. He was just like her father. I was just like her. I was a creep, too. And I was crazy. At least the Creepette told the truth. I was lying. There was no shell pink room.

Except the one inside me. Was I crazy?

Was I? Was I? OK, I hadn't lied all that much.

Only to one person. God, don't see her anymore, avoid her. At all costs don't walk home from school with her again. She will show you to yourself in a way you will not be able to stand. Stay longer after school, I told myself, work on the yearbook, hide in the stairwell, do anything. I never walked home with her again. Now I had no friends at all, not even a creep to be contemptuous of.

The room inside me was empty. There was just that faint glow of pink in the air around the trees that in the north means eventually, after two more months of mud and cold and disbelief it will ever come, there will be spring. Oh no. I was a junior in high school, pretty old for fantasies about kind, rich fathers. And smart, too. My poor alcohol brain-damaged father had become smart in my fantasy, smarter than I was. I felt really stupid now. Don't be stupid! With spring came a deadline. (My self-imposed deadline.) I was going to be asked to the Junior Prom. I was going to get dressed up in something those sorority girls never thought of and I was going to go. And not alone, either. I was going to get someone to ask me. This was reality. I was going to face reality. No more fantasies, Molly. Forget the penthouse. Get going. It is February 19. The Junior Prom is in June. You have three months to get a boyfriend and keep him until the Junior Prom. So go get one. Now.

Sex, attainable. Michael Groden was the smartest boy in my class. He had the kind of mind that snaps back like a brand new window shade. He had gotten perfect scores on both his math and his verbal PSATs. Not only was he the smartest boy in my class, he was smarter than many classes of kids—no one in the history of the school had gotten perfect scores. He had done the impossible. Michael Groden was a kind boy who had friends among smart, not too nerdy boys. And he was Jewish. Polly had conveyed to me the stereotype that Jewish men were nice and always took out the garbage for their wives, bought them diamond rings, and did not drink. I wasn't going to go after a fraternity boy. That was a lost cause. But not just anybody was taking me to the Prom. I didn't think I was very pretty, certainly not pretty and waiflike as my sister was, off in the wilds of junior high. I was going to go after Mike Groden. I was going to go after him and I was going to get him. I was going to focus on him as I focused on my fantasy, but he was real. And I was going to get him, because he was achingly lonely. His loneliness was palpable, a force field around him. His hands jerked and shook when he answered questions in his nervously fierce intelligently shaking voice. I was going to set my hair, and put on makeup, and reach out to him. And he was going to fall.

Sex. Oh, how glad I am you are fallen. We have fallen in the backseat, we have fallen on the high school lawn. We have fallen on the plastic seats of the couch in your basement. We have fallen on my living room floor. I have reached you. And I have brought you home. Polly is always at work now. Gail is always out. Ted stays later and later at the bars. It is … a little bit safe … I am calculating. I am loved, so together we calculate … what we will do if my parents appear. I do not tell him all the really terrible stuff. What am I, crazy? I cannot even tell myself that terrible stuff. But in all the calculating I have not counted on falling myself. I have, but I do not admit it often. How can I let go? Not to be vigilant, not to be aware, aware, aware … how can I? I might get killed.

But, Mike Groden, your shirts smell so good. When we dance my nose fits under your shoulderbone and I drink in the smell of Tide soap and skin underneath. Skin. I have one. He has one. We have borders to our bodies. Oh honey, I wear a black dress to the Prom and carry a rose instead of a corsage and you cooperate. We are smart. I am not wearing pink carnations and a pink pouffy dress. I am an artiste. (An artiste of what it doesn't occur to me to determine. An intellectuelle.) Mike Groden works after school. He is steady. He has bought a car. A car is my equivalent of Polly's diamond ring. He delivers me to my stream of dentist appointments. This is my equivalent of taking out the garbage. He has condoms in his wallet, but don't worry, we don't take them out for another two years. We are slow. We do everything in our own rhythm.

Yes, yes, we're going to mess this up, of course, because neither of us has any model for keeping it going, and besides, we go off to college and have many neurotic adventures and mess up our lives and have our successes and thirty years later we get married, and it is a love story: happiness like this at our ages is a palpable, recognizable fact, not the wafting of a feeling. And throughout our three decades of odysseys we have much in common, so much so that when we get back together we quickly pick up the old, first threads.

Gail off with the cheerleading squad. Ted at his bar. Polly at the store. Late spring. Mike Groden at the screen door on which I have posted a note: Come in. Lock the screen door behind you. Then go to the kitchen table and find another note. I hear him come in from where I am ensconced: in a bubble bath with nearly three times the recommended dose of bubble juice to achieve the right effect—covered in stiff whipped foam as in a Playboy photograph. Mike Groden in the kitchen reading the next note to proceed to my room and take off all his clothes.

"Molly, are you here?"

"Yes, yes," I whisper, "I'm here in the bathroom, but don't come in here!" (He wouldn't have dreamed of coming in.)

"Where's your parents? Are we alone?"

"Yes, we're alone. They won't be home for hours. Do what the notes say!"

When you've removed all your clothes but your underpants, come to the bathroom.

And so he does. And so his eyes pop out of his sockets because there I am. We've done everything but. It is the spring of our senior year. We won't actually make love until the fall when Mike is away at Dartmouth and I take a fifteen-hour bus ride from my state university to Hanover, New Hampshire, but this spring evening in the bath is what we remember together with delight as we think of our earliest sexuality with one another, and marvel that our instincts were so right that our first choice turned out to be our best, lasting choice.

"What if your parents come home?"

"Well, I don't think they will, but we'll have to listen for them and then run to my room."

"I'd better go get our clothes to have them ready just in case, Molly."

I knew he was right. What on earth had I been thinking of to trust fate so? I had been thinking of my body. I had been looking in the full-length mirror on my closet door at my almost eighteen-year-old body trying on my swimsuit for the coming summer and thinking of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, whom I could never get through except to find the dirty parts, and Kenneth Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese with the first woman's sexual voice I had ever heard, the Empress Li Ching Chao who lay in her orchid boat, and then thinking of my own body: How ripe it is, I thought, how ripe I am. Ripe for what I wasn't exactly sure.

"Let's just wash each other first. All over. Then we'll get out together."

"OK," he said as I gave him the washcloth and the soap.

He was real. He was as real as my father, and as different from my father as he could be. He could have been the father to my children, as I could have been the mother to his. Our first choice was our best choice, we know that now that we are forty-seven and in our elaborately designed commuter marriage between my apartment in New York City, which we have made ours, and Mike's house in London, Ontario, Canada, which we have made ours.

When he touched my shoulders with the soapy cloth and proceeded down my breastbone and around each breast, I remembered Marie, the mother of the boys next door. Twelve or thirteen years before, Marie gave me a bath one night. How extraordinarily lightly she swiped the cloth over my arms and legs. "My boys are always covered in scrapes and bruises and scabs from the rough way they play," she said, "so I wash them very lightly, so they don't hurt and so all their bruises can heal." I was astonished.

"Do they get clean?" I asked her. "They get clean enough." I thought you got clean only if you really scrubbed, and held Marie suspect from the point of view of Polly's cleanly values, but loved the sensuous treat of such elaborate care, and loved the safety of the big towel she wrapped around me before she led me off to pajamas, bed, and thoroughly undisturbed sleep.

What special instinct for self-preservation, what luck, led Mike and I to one another then was not only lifesaving, but enhancing. We allowed one another to grow. Our sexual companionship and literary friendship, probably the two most important, self-defining aspects of our lives then, are probably the most important now. We seemed then, and now, to free one another and to support one another simply as curious and sympathetic witnesses to the other's behavior, and ways of thinking, and needs. After we reached our freshman year in colleges many miles away from one another our fabric of support began to fray. It was not only distance, it was a creeping contempt I always felt for him that eroded my other feelings. My fear of my father, my repulsion of him, my lonely unexpressed desire for his affection, my sadness that I did not have his love all manifested themselves in my contempt not only for him, but for Mike, especially when he did something nice for me. I simply couldn't believe a man was doing something nice for me. I thought there had to be something wrong with him; certainly there was something wrong with me. I was so deeply ashamed of my family, and so deeply ashamed of myself. Finally we broke up, and between the ages of nineteen and thirty-eight we completely lost touch with one another.

"Mike Groden!" I said to the nervously thin young woman who had joined the happy, lazy dinner trio of my former seventeenth-century literature professor, his novelist buddy, and myself, their guest of honor. My second book had come out, and I'd been invited to give a reading at State University of New York at Binghamton, where I had gone to college. The three of us had eaten nearly everything on the small menu, and here we were joined by our very late fourth for dinner, a perfectly decent woman I hated on sight because she was very very thin—we had been gobbling our chocolate cakes—and because she ordered only one thing to eat: a bowl of consommé. "I believe I know someone you used to know," she said, looking up from the brown watercolor in the bowl, "Mike Groden."

"Mike Groden! I remember the smell of his shirts! When we used to slow dance, my nose would rest right under his shoulderbone, and when I think of him I can't help but think of the smell of Tide, or All, or Wisk, or whatever it was then…." I trailed off, having seen the discomfort on her face, and realized I had stepped in it; she must have been his girlfriend, his lover.

"He's been ill, you know," she said. "He's been very sick. He's a cancer survivor."

A cancer survivor? So, he had survived something terrible and was alive, even as I had survived something terrible to be alive. He had written a respected book, she said, and he had been the editor of the colossal many-volumed facsimile of James Joyce manuscripts. He did not have children; he had ambition, the ambition of the survivor of something terrible. This I recognized very well. I don't know what I said to her. I remember I pressed my address on her and asked if she would give it to him, but she said she was on her way to Paris and would be unlikely to see him for a long time. What could that mean? I thought. Only that she would prevent my message to him. But meanwhile she told me the name of the university where he taught, and I knew I could reach him there, if I wanted.

Unknown to me, that weekend Mike Groden would read a review of my second book, Raw Heaven, in the New York Times Book Review. He would find my address from my publisher and write to me. We would begin a long, slow, luxuriously platonic adult friendship that would last for another eight years. And one day we would finally talk about that bath.

Molly Peacock contributed the following update to CA in 2007:

The biography I wrote for the Contemporary Authors autobiography series, Volume 21, published in 1995, was composed of early drafts from my memoir, Para-dise, Piece by Piece, later published in 1998 by Riverhead. As a poet just becoming interested in prose, I dove into the emotional states I recollected from childhood and into the history of my marriage to Michael Groden, which began in high school and was interrupted by almost two decades before it resumed again. Those emotional states were so potent that they destroyed chronology, and I thought I would use this update to make a brief statement which includes that chronology, and which looks at the years between 1995 and 2007.

UPDATED CHRONOLOGY:

1947-1977

I was born in Buffalo, New York, on June 30, 1947, at 10:30 a.m., and I spent my first decade with my parents, Pauline and Edward (Ted) Peacock, my sister Gail, my grandparents, Mildred and Howard Peacock, my uncle Howard, my aunt Dorothy (his first wife, who died in childbirth) and my aunt Joan (his second wife) and their two very young children, Howard and Guy. My parents, sister and I lived in one half of a duplex at 15 Gunnell Avenue in North Buffalo, and my grandparents, uncle and his family lived in the other side. We were an extended working-class family, and my father worked for Niagara Mohawk Power Company, reading meters and driving a truck. My grandfather was also a local truck driver. My mother did not work at this time.

In the summer of 1957, when I was ten, our family moved to 147 Pilgrim Road, in the Buffalo, New York suburb of Tonawanda. I attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School, where I was taught English by the remarkable Mrs. Bernice Baeumler, and where I began to write seriously, almost daily, at her suggestion. At this time my mother opened Peacock's Superette, spending long hours at the store. This happened at the same time as my father's increasingly violent alcoholism, and it marked the disintegration of our family. I wrote about the impact of this in Contemporary Authors 1995. During the summers from the ages of ten to fourteen, I visited my mother's parents, Gilbert and Ruth Wright, in LaGrange, New York, a rural hamlet about ninety minutes from Buffalo, and attended Vacation Bible School at LaGrange Baptist Church. Because of the irreligious examples my mother and my grandfather Wright set, I never felt compelled to believe any of the fundamentalist Christian rules and regulations. The summers, for me, were golden moments in which I read and wrote my first poems, and grew to my full height, five feet six.

I went on to Kenmore East Senior High, graduating in 1965, along with my steady boyfriend, Michael Groden. I loved English, French, history, and art, but I spent every summer re-taking my math course. We lived on Pilgrim Road until 1967, when I was a sophomore in college, and my parents finally divorced, ending a long siege of a marriage plagued by my father's alcoholism.

I attended Harpur College, later State University of New York at Binghamton, now Binghamton University, from 1965 to 1969, graduating magna cum laude after studying poetry with Milton Kessler. It was an electric time at the university, where the brilliance of classmates like Camille Paglia, Art Spiegelman, and Deborah Tannen, and the charisma of Milton Kessler sparked my commitment to poetry, and to becoming an artist.

I struggled with becoming a poet, since I wanted, after the draining experiences of my childhood and adolescence, to live a quiet, so-called normal life with my first husband, Jeremy Benton. I even stopped writing for a few years, but found myself unable to repress the images, thoughts, and music inside me, and I began to write again. This marriage, very nurturing to both of us, lasted from 1970 to 1976. After publishing a few poems in the early 1970s, I went to the MacDowell Colony for artists, and then on to The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, where I had the luck to fall in with a remarkable group of writers, including lifelong friends Phillis Levin, Rachel Hadas, Lisa Zeidner, and Tom Sleigh, and to receive a remarkable education from Richard Howard and Michael Fried. I received an M.A. in Creative Writing with honors from Johns Hopkins in 1977, and a postgraduate fellowship for another year.

1977-1995

I became Poet-in-Residence for the schools in the State of Delaware from 1978 to 1981. After my first book, And Live Apart, was published by University of Mis- souri Press in the spring of 1981, I left Delaware for New York City, where I made a safe landing at Friends Seminary School. Here I taught seventh-grade English and worked with learning-disabled children there from 1981 to 1992. During this time I had the great luck to meet the young poetry editor of the Paris Review, Jonathan Galassi, who published my poems and who, when he moved to Random House, published my second book, Raw Heaven, in 1984, the year my father died. This book of sonnets, sensuous in nature, was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by J.D. McClatchy, and my reputation as a poet began to flourish.

When Galassi moved on to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, I stayed at Random House, where Miranda Sherwin, a young editor, published my third book of poems, Take Heart, in 1989. This is a book heavily influenced by my return to psychotherapy with the same therapist I had seen earlier in Binghamton, New York. Now she practiced in New York City. During these years I lived in a tiny studio apartment at 321 East 71st Street. My friend from graduate school, Phillis Levin, lived in Greenwich Village. Our literary friendship grew. We exchanged every single poem we wrote, and we still do. During this time I had a long relationship with composer Marc-Antonio Consoli, and we regularly went to the artists colonies Yaddo and MacDowell as guests in the summers.

Even though I was writing sonnets, I had not particularly thought of myself as a New Formalist, but I was adopted as one by Dana Gioia, whom Phillis Levin and I met one fall night in 1983 at the Madison Avenue Pub after a reading at Books and Company, a bookstore near the Whitney Museum. During this time I also volunteered on the Board of the Poetry Society of America, and became president in 1988, succeeding William Mathews. With Elise Paschen, then director of the PSA, we began the program Poetry in Motion on the subways and buses of New York City. We had no idea that the program would become as successful as it turned out to be. The program has become a tourist attraction on the subways, and it has been instituted in other cities across North America. We worked hard to open the PSA to all the diverse aesthetics in poetry at the time, New Formalists, free verse writers, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. In 1989 I moved downtown, to 505 East 14th Street, in Stuyvesant Town, to be near both Friends Seminary and the Poetry Society on Gramercy Park. In 1991 I began commuting to

London, Ontario, Canada to visit Michael Groden, my high school boyfriend, with whom I recently reconnected, now a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

1995-2007

I married Michael Groden on August 19, 1992. For me, making a longed-for connection with another human being at the age of forty-five meant a leap from a guarded state into an unguarded one, and this required a balance and flexibility I had to learn. I found that I could actually write a poem while I was in the same room as my husband. He never tried to step into my mind. I had never been with such a person before. Oh, yes, I had. I had chosen him in high school as my boyfriend, and twenty-nine years later, when we finally married, I understood why my initial instincts were right.

Though I kept my apartment and still worked in New York after we were married, I returned to his house in London, Ontario, where he provided the space and time out from my city life. There my New York obligations withered and something like a table of time opened before me, a dining room table, all cleared, just waiting for a person to begin a project. I began a memoir, building it around a choice I made and felt was quite right for me but didn't truly understand and didn't quite have words for. The choice was not to have children. (I confirmed this again with my husband before our marriage.) I began to learn a whole new art, creative nonfiction, and it was my agent, Kathleen Anderson, who taught me. She patiently line-edited draft after draft of a memoir that was both easy and painful to write. I just sat in front of the computer—yes, I was using a computer now, not an IBM Selectric typewriter—and it poured out. During this time I also held various honorary positions at universities: Stadler Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University in 1993, poet-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario in 1995, Visiting University Professor at University of California, Riverside in 1998. Paradise, Piece by Piece was published by Riverhead Books in the U.S. and McClelland and Stewart in Canada in 1998.

It was the height of the publishing boom, and I was whisked across North America on a book tour that seemed glamorous from the outside (stunning hotels and readings stacked like the food on plates in glamorous restaurants) but in fact, pressed me to a level of public performance that I never expected. It amazes me that I got anything written, but I also wrote another book, How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle. These essays about reading thirteen of my talisman poems led to an invitation to collaborate with Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca. Since 1998, I have conducted quarterly poetry reading circles with callers on Feraca's show, "Here on Earth."

Although this looks like a frenzy of activity (and it was very, very active), my marriage, which is a cozy, talking sort of marriage, full of humor and shared points of view about the outside world, and full of a gentle play of ideas in the air, grew in its strength and stability. My psychotherapist and I also established a telephone relationship. I no longer considered myself "in" therapy, in series of biweekly appointments, but "in contact" with my therapist, checking in every few months for the refocusing perspective it offers on my over-focused attempts to deal with life. My friendships altered with my marriage and my bi-national life. Though I made new friends in Canada, I invested a great deal of energy in maintaining my friendships in New York, and, as my New York friends scattered around the world, in many other places. Telephones, cell phones, e-mails, all create part of that softened, personal, alternate life that for me underpins the public commitments of readings and lectures.

During the writing of the memoir, from 1992 to 1997, I did not forget my poetry, and I published Original Love in 1995 with W.W. Norton and Company. Original Love contains the poems from that tumultuous time. (My mother died of lung cancer in 1992, four months after we were married; and my sister, with whom I had reconnected because of our mother's illness and because of the memoir, died of throat cancer in 1996.) Adding to the peculiar mix of turmoil and respite of these years was the shift in my way of earning a living. I left the safe haven of Friends Seminary School, where I taught from 1981 to 1992, and I slowly began to invent a freelance life as a teacher and editor of poetry in one-to-one appointments with serious writers of poetry.

Over the past twenty-five years I have helped many emerging poets edit and publish books. Using private music instruction as a model, I developed a way to work, at first in person, and then by telephone, with poets in an ongoing investigation of their creative processes. I've become a student of people's creative impulses as a result. I've noticed that at certain crisis stages, those moments of now-or-never that people seem to have as they climb on hospital gurneys, face certain birthdays, etc. they become determined to rededicate part of themselves to a lost art. I never thought that would happen to me because I dedicated myself to poetry at a fairly young age.

But human growth, I've learned, is more like plant growth than I previously thought. (I became a gardener almost at the instant I became a permanent resident of Canada in 1993. Since 2006 I have been a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada.) My grandmother, Ruth Wright, used to send a chill up my spine when she viciously (to my adolescent mind) lopped off the tops of her windowsill geraniums: "For side growth," she said. Of course I was too busy growing in one direction upwards to understand this. But for mature plants, the stimulation of the side nodes of growth along the stem of a plant promotes health and the restoration of all the leaves that have been shed near the roots. Crisis lops off top growth and sends out side growth. That's both how I happened to learn the new art of nonfiction, and, to my surprise, after menopause (another life event that sends students to me) how I began acting.

In 2002, as W.W. Norton was publishing Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, I began to develop The Shimmering Verge, a one-woman show in poems which I wrote and performed, inspired by the process of col-

lecting the poems from my first four books, by the stories and explanations about the poems that I have developed for readings, and by the essays I wrote for How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle. Part of the inspiration for the show was a venue offered by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, where I was poet-in-residence at the American Poets' Corner from 1999 to 2004. At the Cathedral I became involved in organizing marathon Maundy Thursday readings of Dante's Divine Comedy. This whiff of producing and directing in a spiritual space, coupled with meeting Canadian producer-director Louise Fagan, led to the mounting of The Shimmering Verge, which toured from 2003 to 2006 and included a limited Off Broadway engagement in March, 2005, at Urban Stages Theatre in New York City.

During the learning of the acting techniques and the physical training, as well as doing part of the producing, I knew that engaging in a performing art, while part of that side growth, was also part of my effort to remain visible as a productive, mature woman in a culture, yes, even in a poetry culture, that prefers its women either young or old and gray and where a productive, active woman in her forties and fifties seems to pass behind a veil of invisibility. The Shimmering Verge allowed me to use that veil, literally playing with the idea of a shimmering verge. But a performing art is not a literary art, and I have the private personality of a poet, not the personality of an actor. I understood this instinctively but can only articulate it now that the show is on hiatus. All through the show's development, I wrote another book of poems. I knew I would only have the briefest time to write them, so I gave myself an assignment: fourteen lines, single image. I started the book in Ireland, where my husband, a scholar who writes about James Joyce, spends a good deal of time, and so, as a result, do I. Of course, the poems haven't turned out to obey those rules, but they helped guide me toward my latest book, The Second Blush, which will be published by W.W. Norton in 2008.

During the tour, my husband gave me the gift only a scholar could give to a poet for her birthday. I had been keeping drafts of poems all my life, tossing them into what had grown to sixty boxes of idiosyncratically labeled, vaguely dated paper. He sorted them. When Binghamton University acquired the papers, they were ready for textual study, each poem I've ever written in a separate file.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 27, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 60, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Contemporary Poets, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 120: American Poets since World War II, Third Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

Peacock, Molly, Paradise, Piece by Piece, Putnam (New York, NY), 1998.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, May, 1999, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 25; November, 2001, review of The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, p. 14.

Booklist, November 1, 1984, review of Raw Heaven, p. 30; April 15, 1989, review of Take Heart, p. 1425; March 15, 1995, Elizabeth Gunderson, review of Original Love, p. 1302; April 15, 1998, Donna Seaman, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 1414; March 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle, p. 1273; May 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The Private I, p. 1713; August 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2002, p. 1913.

Boston Review, December, 1984, Matthew Gilbert, review of Raw Heaven, pp. 30-31.

Canadian Book Review, 1998, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 77.

Georgia Review, fall, 1984, review of Raw Heaven, p. 628; fall, 1989, review of Take Heart, p. 589.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 2, 2002, review of Cornucopia, p. D22.

Hudson Review, autumn, 1981, Robert Phillips, review of And Live Apart, p. 427.

Kenyon Review, summer, 1991, Steve Kronen, review of Take Heart, p. 161.

Kliatt, May, 2004, James Beschta, review of Cornucopia, p. 32.

Library Journal, January, 1985, Robert Hudzik, review of Raw Heaven, p. 88; April 1, 1989, Barbara Hoffert, review of Take Heart, p. 92; February 15, 1995, Frank Allen, review of Original Love, p. 159; May 15, 1998, Mary Paumier Jones, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 86; May 1, 1999, Ellen Sullivan, review of How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle, p. 77; June 1, 2001, Mark Bay, review of The Private I, p. 163.

Lip, May 7, 2001, Suzanne Cody, review of The Private I.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 20, 1989, Ian Gregson, review of Take Heart, p. 3; June 1, 2003, review of Cornucopia, p. R14.

Michigan Quarterly Review, fall, 1996, Bruce Bonds, review of Original Love, p. 734.

Midwest Book Review, April, 2005, review of An Imperfect Lover.

Ms., May, 1998, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 88.

New England Review, winter, 1986, review of Raw Heaven, p. 230.

New Republic, July 17, 1989, Christopher Benfey, review of Take Heart, pp. 31-34.

New York Times Book Review, December 2, 1984, J.D. McClatchy, review of Raw Heaven, pp. 54-55; October 22, 1989, Jay Parini, review of Take Heart, p. 16.

North American Review, December, 1989, review of Take Heart, p. 58.

O, the Oprah Magazine, February, 2006, "This Is Your Life!," p. 53.

Parnassus, spring, 1985, Christopher Benfey, review of Raw Heaven, pp. 500-512.

Poetry, November, 1985, Grace Schulman, review of Raw Heaven, p. 107; April, 1990, Henri Cole, review of Take Heart, p. 38.

Publishers Weekly, July 13, 1984, review of Raw Heaven, p. 42; February 24, 1989, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Take Heart, p. 227; February 27, 1995, review of Original Love, p. 98; May 4, 1998, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 194; March 29, 1999, review of How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle, p. 100; May 7, 2001, review of The Private I, p. 238; July 22, 2002, review of Cornucopia, p. 171.

Quill & Quire, April, 1998, review of Paradise, Piece by Piece, p. 27; June 1999, review of How to Read a Poem—And Start a Poetry Circle, p. 56.

Saturday Review, July, 1985, review of Raw Heaven, p. 67.

Southern Humanities Review, winter, 1986, review of Raw Heaven, p. 91; fall, 1990, Diann Blakely Shoaf, review of Take Heart, p. 397.

Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 2004, Carrie Etter, review of Cornucopia, p. 32.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 6, 1989, review of Take Heart, p. 5.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1985, review of Raw Heaven, p. 54; autumn, 1989, review of Take Heart, p. 137.

Washington Post Book World, September 2, 1984, David Lehman, review of Raw Heaven, p. 6.

ONLINE

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (August 25, 2007), author interview.

Molly Peacock Home Page,http://www.mollypeacock.org (August 25, 2007).

Poets.org,http://www.poets.org/ (August 25, 2007), author profile.

Writers' Union of Canada,http://www.writersunion.ca/ (August 25, 2007), author profile.