by Marge Piercy
when sneakers mold like Roquefort, paper wilts.
On moors webbed in fog we wander, or wade
in the salt marsh as the wet lands ripple.
How grey, how wet, how cold
They are bits of fog caught in armor.
The outside pretends to the solidity of rocks
and requires force and skill bearing in
to cut the muscle, shatter the illusion.
If you stare at them, your stomach
curls, the grey eyes of Athene
pried out, the texture of heavy phlegm,
chill clots of mortality and come.
They lie on the tongue, distillations
of the sea. Fresh as the morning
wind that tatters the mist.
Sweet as cream but with that bottom
of granite, the taste of deep well
water drawn up on the hottest day,
the vein of slate in true Chablis,
the kiss of acid sharpening the tongue.
They slip down quick as minnows
darting to cover, and the mouth
remembers sex. Both provide
a meeting of the primitive
and worldly, in that we do
little more for oysters than the gull
smashing the shells on the rocks
or the crab wrestling them open,
yet in subtle flavor and the choice
to taste them raw comes a delicacy
not of the brain but of the senses
and the wit to leave perfection bare.
Deer couchant
Seen from the air, when the small plane
veers in and hangs for a moment
suspended like a gull in the wind,
the dune grass breathes,
hue of rabbit fur.
The waves are regular,
overlapping like fish scales.
The Cape in winter viewed
from above is a doe
of the small island race
lying down but not asleep,
the small delicate head
slightly lifted. She rests
from the ravages of the summer
as a deer will take her ease after
the season of rifles and boots.
Peaches in November
On the peach’s wide sieve of branches
the buds crouch already in whitish caterpillar fur.
All winter they must hold tight, as the supple
limbs are strained wide by the snow’s weight,
as the ice coats them and turns them to glinting
small lights that splinter the sun to prickles.
Must hold tight against the wet warm tongue
of the thaw that lolls off the Gulf Stream
smelling of seaweed and the South, as if
not spring visited but summer in January.
Hold tight against the early March sun
with the wild tulips already opening
against the brown earth like painted mouths
when the ice will return as a thief
to take what has too widely trusted.
The news they carry can only be told once
to the bees each year. The bud is the idea
of sweetness, of savor, of round heft
waiting to build itself. As the winter
clamps down they hibernate in fur,
little polar bears on red twigs
dreaming of turning one sun into many.
Six underrated pleasures
1. Folding sheets
They must be clean.
There ought to be two of you
to talk as you work, your
eyes and hands meeting.
They can be crisp, a little rough
and fragrant from the line;
or hot from the dryer
as from an oven. A silver
grey kitten with amber
eyes to dart among
the sheets and wrestle and leap out
helps. But mostly pleasure
lies in the clean linen
slapping into shape.
Whenever I fold a fitted sheet
making the moves that are like
closing doors, I feel my mother.
The smell of clean laundry is hers.
2. Picking pole beans
Gathering tomatoes has no art
to it. Their ripe redness shouts.
But the scarlet runner beans twine
high and jungly on their tripods.
You must reach in delicately,
pinch off the sizable beans
but leave the babies to swell
into flavor. It is hide-and-seek,
standing knee deep in squash
plants running, while the bees
must be carefully disentangled
from your hair. Early you may see
the hummingbird, but best to wait
until the dew burns off.
Basket on your arm, your fingers
go swimming through the raspy leaves
to find prey just their size.
Then comes the minor zest
of nipping the ends off with your nails
and snapping them in pieces,
their retorts like soft pistolry.
Then eat the littlest raw.
3. Taking a hot bath
Surely nobody has ever decided
to go on a diet while in a tub.
The body is beautiful stretched
out under water wavering.
It suggests a long island of pleasure
whole seascapes of calm sensual
response, the nerves as gentle fronds
of waterweed swaying in warm currents.
Then if ever we must love ourselves
in the amniotic fluid floating
a ship at anchor in a perfect
protected blood-warm tropical bay.
The water enters us and the minor
pains depart, supplanted guests,
the aches, the strains, the chills.
Muscles open like hungry clams.
Born again from my bath like a hot
sweet-tempered, sweet-smelling baby,
I am ready to seize sleep like a milky breast
or start climbing my day hand over hand.
4. Sleeping with cats
I am at once source
and sink of heat: giver
and taker. I am a vast
soft mountain of slow breathing.
The smells I exude soothe them:
the lingering odor of sex,
of soap, even of perfume,
its afteraroma sunk into skin
mingling with sweat and the traces
of food and drink.
They are curled into flowers
of fur, they are coiled
hot seashells of flesh
in my armpit, around my head
a dark sighing halo.
They are plastered to my side,
a poultice fixing sore muscles
better than a heating pad.
They snuggle up to my sex
purring. They embrace my feet.
Some cats I place like a pillow.
In the morning they rest where
I arranged them, still sleeping.
Some cats start at my head
and end between my legs
like a textbook lover. Some
slip out to prowl the living room
patrolling, restive, then
leap back to fight about
hegemony over my knees.
Every one of them cares
passionately where they sleep
and with whom.
Sleeping together is a euphemism
for people but tantamount
to marriage for cats.
Mammals together we snuggle
and snore through the cold nights
while the stars swing round
the pole and the great horned
owl hunts for flesh like ours.
5. Planting bulbs
No task could be easier.
Just dig the narrow hole,
drop in the handful of bone
meal and place the bulb
like a swollen brown garlic
clove full of hidden resources.
Their skin is the paper
of brown bags. The smooth
pale flesh peeks through.
Three times its height
is its depth, a parable
against hard straining.
The art is imagining
the spring landscape poking
through chrysanthemum, falling
leaves, withered brown lushness
of summer. The lines drawn
now, the colors mixed
will pop out of the soil
after the snow sinks from sight
into it. The circles,
the casual grace of tossed handfuls,
the soldierly rows will stand,
the colors sing sweet or sour.
When the first sharp ears
poke out, you are again
more audience than actor,
as if someone said, Close
your eyes and draw a picture.
Now open them and look.
6. Canning
We pour a mild drink each,
turn on the record player,
Beethoven perhaps or Vivaldi,
opera sometimes, and then together
in the steamy kitchen we put up
tomatoes, peaches, grapes, pears.
Each fruit has a different
ritual: popping the grapes
out of the skins like little
eyeballs, slipping the fuzz
from the peaches and seeing
the blush painted on the flesh beneath.
It is part game: What shall
we magic wand this into?
Peach conserve, chutney, jam,
brandied peaches. Tomatoes
turn juice, sauce hot or mild
or spicy, canned, ketchup.
Vinegars, brandies, treats
for the winter: pleasure
deferred. Canning is thrift
itself in sensual form,
surplus made beautiful, light
and heat caught in a jar.
I find my mother sometimes
issuing from the steam, aproned,
red faced, her hair up in a net.
Since her death we meet usually
in garden or kitchen. Ghosts
come reliably to savors, I learn.
In the garden your ashes,
in the kitchen your knowledge.
Little enough we can save
from the furnace of the sun
while the bones grow brittle as paper
and the hair itself turns ashen.
But what we can put by, we do
with gaiety and invention
while the music laps round us
like dancing light, but Mother,
this pleasure is only deferred.
We eat it all before it spoils.
A note about the author
Marge Piercy is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, including Colors Passing Through Us; The Art of Blessing the Day; Early Grrrl; What Are Big Girls Made Of?; Mars and Her Children; The Moon Is Always Female; her selected poems Circles on the Water; Stone, Paper, Knife; and My Mother’s Body. In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. Her book of craft essays, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, is part of the Poets on Poetry series of the University of Michigan Press. She is also the author of fifteen novels and, most recently, a memoir entitled Sleeping with Cats. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.
Marge Piercy’s Web site address is www.margepiercy.com.
