by Marge Piercy
Did I truly think you could put me back inside?
Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten
furnace and be recast, that I would become you?
What did you fear in me, the child who wore
your hair, the woman who let that black hair
grow long as a banner of darkness, when you
a proper flapper wore yours cropped?
You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery
flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.
Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.
Secretly the bones formed in the bread.
I became willful, private as a cat.
You never knew what alleys I had wandered.
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter
queen in a dress sewn of knives.
All I feared was being stuck in a box
with a lid. A good woman appeared to me
indistinguishable from a dead one
except that she worked all the time.
Your payday never came. Your dreams ran
with bright colors like Mexican cottons
that bled onto the drab sheets of the day
and would not bleach with scrubbing.
My dear, what you said was one thing
but what you sang was another, sweetly
subversive and dark as blackberries,
and I became the daughter of your dream.
This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
THE CHUPPAH
Dedicated to Rabbi Debra Hachen,
who made a beautiful wedding with us,
for which many of the poems in this section were written.
Two poems by Ira Wood are included.
Witnessing a wedding
Slowly and slower you have learned
to let yourselves grow while weaving
through each other in strong cloth.
It is not strangeness in the mate
you must fear, and not the fear
that loosens us so we lean back
chilly with a sudden draft on flesh
recently joined and taste again
the other sharp as tin in the mouth,
but familiarity we must mistrust,
the word based on the family
that fogs the sight and plugs the nose.
Fills the ears with the wax of possession.
Toughens the daily dead skin
callused against penetration.
Never think you know finally, or say
My husband likes, My wife is,
without balancing in the coil of the inner ear
that no one is surely anything till dead.
Love without respect is cold as a boa
constrictor, its caresses as choking.
Celebrate your differences in bed.
Like species, couples die out or evolve.
Ah strange new beasties with strawberry hides,
velvet green antlers, undulant necks,
tentacles, wings and the senses of bees,
your own changing mosaic of face
and the face of the stranger you live with
and try to love, who enters your body
like water, like pain, like food.
Touch tones
We learn each other in braille,
what the tongue and teeth taste,
what the fingers trace, translate
into arias of knowledge and delight
of silk and stubble, of bark
and velvet and wet roses,
warbling colors that splash through
bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,
the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor
of resin, the voice that later
comes unbidden as a Mozart horn
concerto circling in the ears.
You are translated from label,
politic mask, accomplished patter,
to the hands round hefting,
to a weight, a thrust, a scent
sharp as walking in early
morning a path through a meadow
where a fox has been last night
and something in the genes saying
FOX to that rich ruddy smell.
The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth
can speak a name in runes. Absent,
your presence carols in the blood.
The place where everything changed
Great love is an abrupt switching
in a life bearing along at express speeds
expecting to reach the designated stations
at the minute listed in the timetable.
Great love can cause derailment,
coaches upended, people screaming,
luggage strewn over the mountainside,
blood and paper on the grass.
It’s months before the repairs are done,
everyone discharged from the hospital,
all the lawsuits settled, damage
paid for, the scandal subsided.
Then we get on with the journey
in some new direction, hiking overland
with camels, mules, via helicopter
by barge through canals.
The maps are all redrawn and what
was north is east of south
and there be dragons in those mountains
and the sun shines warmer and hairier
and the moon has a cat’s face.
There is more sunshine. More rain.
The seasons are marked and intense.
We seldom catch colds.
There is always you at my back
ready to fight when I must fight;
there is always you at my side
the words flashing light and shadow.
What was grey ripples scarlet and golden;
what was bland reeks of ginger and brandy;
what was empty roars like a packed stadium;
what slept gallops for miles.
Even our bones are reformed in the close
night when we hold each other’s dreams.
Memories uncoil backward and are remade.
Now the first egg itself is freshly twinned.
We build daily houses brick by brick.
We put each other up at night like tents.
This story tells itself as it grows.
Each morning we give birth to one another.
What Makes It Good?
What makes it good
Is that we came to this
Having each tasted freely
Of the sweet plum flesh of others.
So your head will not turn?
It may turn.
But my feet won’t follow.
What makes it good
Is that we came to this slowly
Not blind or in white fever
Tearing off our clothes running
But walking arm around shoulder
Friends.
So you will not fight?
We will fight
Fists balled, throats
Full to choking
But we have learned
How to stop
Before the blade hits the throat.
What makes it good
Is that we give each other
Freedom, for the laughter
Of others.
So you’ve never had to give up friends?
I have given up
My gang of boys.
They wanted me to trade
Her for them
But why trade
When you have what you want?
What makes it good
Is that neither dawdles thinking
My lover kept me back.
So you are not ambitiou
s?
I am ambitious.
And what will you do about her?
Take her with me.
And if you go nowhere?
It is no fault of hers.
What makes it good
Is that we
Both
Want it bad,
To be good.
Ira Wood
Why marry at all?
Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished, like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magenta blossom in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?
Why register with the State?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?
Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.
Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.
But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place
which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.
This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.
We Come Together
We come together
Pure and ample
Top-heavy woman
Stocky man
Midwestern half-breed
Long Island Jew.
Jew with eyes of jade
Jew with eyes of almonds
Jews with tempers
Like the blue serpent tongue
Of the lightning that cracks
The sky over our land.
We come together strong
Strong as our passion to lie
Skin pressed to skin, quivering.
Strong as our hunger
To tell, to taste, to know.
I am lucky to have you
I know it.
But with each windfall
Comes the tax
With each rainfall
The weeds
To kneel and pull.
We give and take
With no line between.
We grow our food.
We heal our wounds.
You remind me
Good writing takes time,
I bolster you
When the world attacks.
We came together
Each an other,
Sister brother
Mother son
Father daughter
Man and woman.
We lick each other’s skins like lost kittens.
Fight like starving strays.
We talk deep into the night
Make each other coffee
Keep each other straight.
We are scrub oak
Strong and low
Peony
Full bodied, brilliant
Feast for the butterfly
Feast for the ant.
Our love is like the land.
We work to keep it fertile.
Ira Wood
Every leaf is a mouth
The way the grain of you runs
wavy and strong as maple.
Black grapes warm in the hand,
the bloom on them like mist,
breathe their scent in gusts:
dusk of a summer evening.
In sleep you shimmer heat
banked like a Russian stove.
How wide you open to me,
a volcano gaping its belly
of fire all the way to the molten
core; a tree whose every leaf
is a mouth drinking sunshine
whose roots are all mouths.
Our life is a daily fugue
polyphonic, with odd harmonies
that make the bones vibrate
secretly, sweetly in the flesh
the way a divining rod shivers
over veins of water, or power.
The Wine
Red is the body’s own deep song,
the color of lips, of our busy
organs, heart and stomach and lungs,
the color of our roused genitals,
the color of tongues and the flag of our blood.
Red is the loudest color
and the most secret
lurking inside the clothes’ cocoon,
banked in the dark of the nightly bed
like coals shimmering in a stove.
It is the hot color, the active
that dances into your eye leaping,
that goads and pricks you
with its thorn of fire,
that shouts and urges and commands.
But red coils in the wineglass
head into tail like a dozing cat
whose eyes have shut but who purrs still
the pleasure of your hand, whose
warmth gently loosens the wine’s aroma
so it rises like a perfumed ghost
inside the chambers of your nose.
In the mouth wine opens
its hundred petals like a damask rose
and then subsides, swallowed to afterglow.
In the wine press of the bed
of all the salty flows of our bodies,
the heat of our love ferments
our roundness into the midnight red
flowering of the wine
that can make drunken and make warm
that can comfort and quicken the sluggish
that can ease the weary body into sleep
that can frame the dark bread and cheese
into feast, that can celebrate
and sing through the wine of the body,
its own bright blood that rushes
to every cranny and cove of the flesh
and dark of the bone, the joy in love
that is the wine of life.
The Chuppah
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The home has its four corners.
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The marriage stands on four legs.
Four points loose the winds
that blow on the walls of the house,
the south wind that brings the warm rain,
the east wind that brings the cold rain,
the north wind that brings the cold sun
and the snow, the long west wind
bringing the weather off the far plains.
Here we live open to the seasons.
Here the winds caress and cuff us
contrary and fierce as bears.
Here the winds are caught and snarling
in the pines, a cat in a net clawing
breaking twigs to fight loose.
Here the winds brush your face
soft in the morning as feathers
that float down from a dove’s breast.
Here the moon sails up out of the ocean
dripping like a just washed apple.
Here the sun wakes us like a baby.
Therefore the chuppah has no sides.
It is not a box.
It is not a coffin.
It is not a dead end.
Therefore the chuppah has no walls
We have made a home together
open to the weather of our time.
We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle
converting fierce energy into bread.
The canopy is the cloth of our table
where we share fruit and vegetables
of our labor, where our care for the earth
comes back and we take its body in ours.
The canopy is the cover of our bed
where our bodies open their portals wide,
where we eat and drink the blood
of our love, where the skin shines red
as a swallowed sunrise and we burn
in one furnace of joy molten as steel
and the dream is flesh and flower.
O my love O my love we dance
under the chuppah standing over us
like an animal on its four legs,
like a table on which we set our love
as a feast, like a tent
under which we work
not safe but no longer solitary
in the searing heat of our time.
How we make nice
Before we clean, we scream
accusatory, rowdy as gulls.
We screech, we bark, we flap.
Abruptly we subside and start.
Always it is two weeks past
the last endurable point.
It is destiny we grovel to,
that if we do not clean
we will smother in our own dirt.
We mutter and swot and heave.
We scrub and spray and haul out.
The vacuum cleaner chokes on a tissue
ball, its bag exploding; some cat
vomited behind the heaviest couch.
Dusted cobwebs fall on the scrubbed counter.
O house, neat as a stamp collection,
everything in its place ordained
glimmering with propriety at last.
Invite all our friends to dinner,
summon the neighbors who call
this the jungle. Let in the cats
