by Marge Piercy
My poems go out into the world as best they can in print or on the Internet and get used for memorial services, love notes, political organizing, teaching, religious services, weddings, and bar and bat mitzvot. All that is appropriate. I write the poems, but they belong to whoever wants them. That’s how poetry stays alive—in the minds and voices of those who want to share it. I hear regularly from people for whom my poetry is meaningful and part of their consciousness. That means a great deal to me.
from
Stone, Paper, Knife
A key to common lethal fungi
What rots it is taking
for granted. To assume what
is given you is laid on like the water
that rushes from the faucet singing
when you turn the tap. Wait
till the reservoir goes dry
to learn how precious are those
clear diamond drops.
We hunt our lovers like deer
through the thorny thickets and after
we have caught love we start
eating it to the bone.
We use it up in hamburgers
complaining of monotony.
We walk all over the common miracles
without bothering to wipe our feet.
Then we wonder why we need more
and more salt to taste our food.
My old man, my old lady, my
ball and chain: listen, even the cat
you found starving in the alley
who purrs you to sleep dancing
with kneading paws in your hair
will vanish if your heart closes its fist.
Habit’s fine dust chokes us.
As in a city the streetlights
and neon signs prevent us from viewing
the stars, so the casual noise, the smoke
of ego turning over its engine blinds
us till we can no longer see past
our minor needs to the major constellations
of the ram, the hunter, the swan
that guide our finite gaze
through the infinite dark.
The common living dirt
The small ears prick on the bushes,
furry buds, shoots tender and pale.
The swamp maples blow scarlet.
Color teases the corner of the eye,
delicate gold, chartreuse, crimson,
mauve speckled, just dashed on.
The soil stretches naked. All winter
hidden under the down comforter of snow,
delicious now, rich in the hand
as chocolate cake: the fragrant busy
soil the worm passes through her gut
and the beetle swims in like a lake.
As I kneel to place the seeds
careful as stitching, I am in love.
You are the bed we all sleep on.
You are the food we eat, the food
we ate, the food we will become.
We are walking trees rooted in you.
You can live thousands of years
undressing in the spring your black
body, your red body, your brown body
penetrated by the rain. Here
is the goddess unveiled,
the earth opening her strong thighs.
Yet you grow exhausted with bearing
too much, too soon, too often, just
as a woman wears through like an old rug.
We have contempt for what we spring
from. Dirt, we say, you’re dirt
if we were not all your children.
We have lost the simplest gratitude.
We lack the knowledge we showed ten
thousand years past, that you live
a goddess but mortal, that what we take
must be returned; that the poison we drop
in you will stunt our children’s growth.
Tending a plot of your flesh binds
me as nothing ever could, to the seasons,
to the will of the plants, clamorous
in their green tenderness. What
calls louder than the cry of a field
of corn ready, or trees of ripe peaches?
I worship on my knees, laying
seeds in you, that worship rooted
in need, in hunger, in kinship,
flesh of the planet with my own flesh,
a ritual of compost, a litany of manure.
My garden’s a chapel, but a meadow
gone wild in grass and flower
is a cathedral. How you seethe
with little quick ones, vole, field
mouse, shrew and mole in their thousands,
rabbit and woodchuck. In you rest
the jewels of the genes wrapped in seed.
Power warps because it involves joy
in domination; also because it means
forgetting how we too starve, break
like a corn stalk in the wind, how we
die like the spinach of drought,
how what slays the vole slays us.
Because you can die of overwork, because
you can die of the fire that melts
rock, because you can die of the poison
that kills the beetle and the slug,
we must come again to worship you
on our knees, the common living dirt.
Toad dreams
That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it.
—Henry Thoreau
The dream of toads: we rarely
credit what we consider lesser
life with emotions big as ours,
but we are easily distracted,
abstracted. People sit nibbling,
before television’s flicker watching
ghosts chase balls and each other
while the skunk is out risking grisly
death to cross the highway to mate;
while the fox scales the wire fence
where it knows the shotgun lurks
to taste the sweet blood of a hen.
Birds are greedy little bombs
bursting to give voice to appetite.
I had a cat who died of love, starving
when my husband left her too.
Dogs trail their masters across con-
tinents. We are far too busy
to be starkly simple in passion.
We will never dream the intense
wet spring lust of the toads.
Down at the bottom of things
In the marshes of the blood river
frogs blurt out their grocery lists
of lust, and some frogs croak poems.
In the brackish backwaters of the psyche
the strong night side of our nature
develops its food chain. I do believe
that in corporate board rooms, in bank
offices, in the subcommittees of Congress,
senators with oil bribes easing their way
toward power act from greed, yes,
but petty hatreds flash swarming thick
as piranhas in their murky speeches, and around
their deals musty resentments circle
buzzing like fat horseflies.
In the salty estuary of the blood river
small intermittent truths dart
in fear through the eel grass, and the nastier
facts come striding, herons stabbing
with long bills yet graceful when they rise in heavy
flight. Here we deal with the archaic base
of advertising slogans and bureaucratic
orders that condemn babies to kwashiorkor,
here on the mud flats of language. Our duty
rises red as the rusty moon, waxing
and waning surely but always returning.
Here where the salty fluids of the blood
meet the renewal of fr
eshwater streaming
from the clouds soaked through the grasses,
down runoff ditches, wandering through brown
meanders of stream; here where the ocean
turns on its elbow muttering and begins
to heave back on itself, whispering
its rise in all the little fiddler crab
burrows, through all the interstices
of tidal grass, we read the news
in minute flotsam of the large
catastrophes out at sea and upriver.
The oil slicks, the wrecks, the sewage
tainted, the chemicals dumped in the stream
we taste here clamlike as we strain
the waters to prophesy in frogs’ tongues.
A marsh smells like sex and teems
with tiny life that all the showier
big creatures of the shallow sea
fatten on. Here the only decision
that presents itself is to see, to watch,
to taste, to listen, to know and to say,
all with care as the heron stalks probing,
all with care as the crab scuttles into the safety
of burrow, all with care as the kingfisher
watches, one way the fish, the other way
the hawk. To survive saying, to say again
and again, here in the rich soup of creation,
in the obscure salty pit where the rhythms
of life repeat and renew, and the cost
of greed is etched in poison on every cell.
A story wet as tears
Remember the princess who kissed the frog
so he became a prince? At first they danced
all weekend, toasted each other in the morning
with coffee, with champagne at night
and always with kisses. Perhaps it was
in bed after the first year had ground
around she noticed he had become cold
with her. She had to sleep
with heating pad and down comforter.
His manner grew increasingly chilly
and damp when she entered a room.
He spent his time in water sports,
hydroponics, working on his insect
collection.
Then in the third year
when she said to him one day, “My dearest,
are you taking your vitamins daily,
you look quite green,” he leaped
away from her.
Finally on their
fifth anniversary she confronted him.
“My precious, don’t you love me any
more?” He replied, “Ribbit. Ribbit.”
Though courtship turns frogs into princes,
marriage turns them quietly back.
Absolute zero in the brain
Penfield the great doctor did a lobotomy
on his own sister and recorded
pages of clinical observations
on her lack of initiative afterward.
Dullness, he wrote, is superseded
by euphoria at times. Slight hemi-
paresis with aphasia. The rebellious sister
died from the head down into the pages
of medical journals and Penfield founded
a new specialty. Intellectuals
sneer at moviegoers who confuse
Dr. Frankenstein with his monster.
The fans think Frankenstein is the monster.
Isn’t he?
Eating my tail
There are times in my life to which I
return like a cat scratching, licking,
worrying at an old sore, a long since
exterminated nest of fleas behind my ear.
I seem sure that if I keep poking
and rubbing that old itch will finally
be quelled. Or is it pattern I seek?
A mapmaker returning to the mountains
to pace out again the distances.
Of course, if the massacre had not
occurred in this pass, why would we care?
Some disasters alter the landscape
and realign even the roads driven
over years before. It is the bloody
moon of pain that gives a lurid
backlighting to this scene I peer at
beating my wings of anxiety silent
as a bat. Yet if pain gives portent
to the words spoken, it denies entrance.
They sit at the table and eat. Wine
is poured, she gets up to bring
warm bread. Yellow apples are heaped
in an orange bowl whose sides reflect
candle flames. Telling a story, she takes
his hand. I know of course what she thinks
is happening and how wrong she is.
But if I opened his forehead, would I find
the violence and anger to come? The past,
it’s turning out the pocket of a jacket
I wore in the garden: plant ties, half
a packet of seeds, a mummified peach:
a combination of intention and waste.
They laugh heartily and the soup steams
and the golden apples shine like lumps of amber.
The present tears at the past as if living
were something the mind could ever hold
like water in a cup or a map in the hand.
Maps are abstractions useful for finding
whatever is actually entered on them.
Otherwise you just walk in. And through.
When you go back it’s always someplace else.
It breaks
You hand me a cup of water;
I drink it and thank you pretending
what I take into me so calmly
could not kill me. We take food
from strangers, from restaurants
behind whose swinging doors flies
swarm and settle, from estranged
lovers who dream over the salad plates
of breaking the bones of our backs.
Trust flits through the apple
blossoms, a tiny spring warbler
in bright mating plumage. Trust
relies on learned pattern
and signal to let us walk down
stairs without thinking each
step, without stumbling.
I take parts of your body
inside me. I give you
the flimsy black lace and sweat
stained sleaze of my secrets.
I lay my sleeping body naked
at your side. Jump, you shout.
I do and you catch me.
In love we open wide as a house
to a summer afternoon, every shade up
and window cranked open and doors
flung back to the probing breeze.
If we love long, we stand like row
houses with no outer walls.
Suddenly we are naked.
The plaster of bedrooms
hangs exposed, wallpaper
pink and beige skins of broken
intimacy, torn and flapping.
To fear you is fearing my left hand
cut off. The lineaments of old
desire remain, but the gestures
are new and harsh. Words unheard
before are spat out grating
with the rush of loosed anger.
Friends bear banner headlines
of your rewriting of our common
past. I wonder at my own trust
how absolute it was, part of me
like the bones of my pelvis.
You were the true center of my
cycles, the magnetic north
I used to plot my wanderings.
It is not that I will not love
again or give myself into partnership
or lie naked sweating secrets
like nectar, but I will never
share a joint checking account
and wh
en some lover tells me, Always,
baby, I’ll be thinking, sure,
until this one too meets an heiress
and ships out. After a bone breaks
you can see in X-rays
the healing and the damage.
What’s that smell in the kitchen?
All over America women are burning dinners.
It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock
in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they’re supposed to bring with calico
smiles on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it’s
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
The weight
1.
I lived in the winter drought of his anger,
cold and dry and bright. I could not breathe.
