The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010

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The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 Page 15

by Marge Piercy


  their birthdays, they want to talk

  when you’re just too tired.

  Leave the answering machine on.

  No one comes to the door any longer.

  We would be scared.

  That’s why we have an alarm.

  That’s why we keep the gun loaded.

  Drive-in food, drive-in teller,

  drive-by shooting, stay in the car.

  Talk only to the television set.

  It tells you just what to buy

  so you won’t feel lonely

  any longer, so you won’t feel

  inadequate, bored, so you can

  almost imagine yourself alive.

  Always unsuitable

  She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.

  They were grinning politely and evenly at me.

  Unsuitable they smirked. It is true

  I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts

  too big for the silhouette. She knew

  at once that we had sex, lots of it

  as if I had strolled into her diningroom

  in a dirty negligee smelling gamy

  smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry

  on my neck. I could never charm

  the mothers, although the fathers ogled

  me. I was exactly what mothers had warned

  their sons against. I was quicksand.

  I was trouble in the afternoon. I was

  the alley cat you don’t bring home.

  Where I came from, the nights I had wandered

  and survived, scared them, and where

  I would go they never imagined.

  Ah, what you wanted for your sons

  were little ladies hatched from the eggs

  of pearls like pink and silver lizards

  cool, well behaved and impervious

  to desire and weather alike. Mostly

  that’s who they married and left.

  Oh, mamas, I would have been your friend.

  I would have cooked for you and held you.

  I might have rattled the windows

  of your sorry marriages, but I would

  have loved you better than you know

  how to love yourselves, bitter sisters.

  from

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  The art of blessing the day

  This is the blessing for rain after drought:

  Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,

  a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.

  Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.

  Enter my skin, wash me for the little

  chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.

  In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

  This is the blessing for sun after long rain:

  Now everything shakes itself free and rises.

  The trees are bright as pushcart ices.

  Every last lily opens its satin thighs.

  The bees dance and roll in pollen

  and the cardinal at the top of the pine

  sings at full throttle, fountaining.

  This is the blessing for a ripe peach:

  This is luck made round. Frost can nip

  the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,

  a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,

  the burrowing worm that coils in rot can

  blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.

  Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

  This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:

  Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store

  sells in January, those red things with the savor

  of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.

  How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,

  warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.

  You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

  This is the blessing for a political victory:

  Although I shall not forget that things

  work in increments and epicycles and sometime

  leaps that half the time fall back down,

  let’s not relinquish dancing while the music

  fits into our hips and bounces our heels.

  We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

  The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,

  the blessing for love returned, for friends’

  return, for money received unexpected;

  the blessing for the rising of the bread,

  the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental

  about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote

  with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

  But the discipline of blessings is to taste

  each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet

  and the salty, and be glad for what does not

  hurt. The art is in compressing attention

  to each little and big blossom of the tree

  of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,

  its savor, its aroma and its use.

  Attention is love, what we must give

  children, mothers, fathers, pets,

  our friends, the news, the woes of others.

  What we want to change we curse and then

  pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can

  with eyes and hands and tongue. If you

  can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.

  Learning to read

  My mother would not teach me to read.

  Experts in newspapers and pop books

  said school must receive us virgin.

  Secrets were locked in those

  black scribbles on white, magic

  to open the sky and the earth.

  In a book I tried to guess from

  pictures, a mountain had in its side

  a door through which children ran in

  after a guy playing a flute

  dressed all in green, and I too

  wanted to march into a mountain.

  When I sat at Grandmother’s seder,

  the book went around and everybody

  read. I did not make a distinction

  between languages. Half the words

  in English were strange to me.

  I knew when I had learned to read

  all would be clear, I would know

  everything that adults knew, and more.

  Every handle would turn for me.

  At school I grabbed words like toys

  I had been denied. Finally I

  could read, me. I read every sign

  from the car. On journeys I read

  maps. I read cereal boxes

  and cans spelling out the hard words.

  All printing was sacred.

  At the seder I sat down at the table,

  self-important, adult on my cushion.

  I was no longer the youngest child

  but the smartest. When the haggadah

  was to be passed across me,

  I grabbed it, roaring confidence.

  But the squiggles, the scratches

  were back. Not a letter

  waved to me. I was blinded again.

  That night I learned about tongues.

  Grandma explained she herself spoke

  Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian

  and bad English, little Hebrew.

  That’s okay, I said. I will

  learn all languages. But I was

  fifty before I read Hebrew.

  I no longer expect to master

  every alphabet before death

  snatches away everything I know.

  But they are always beckoning to me

  those languages still squiggles

  and noises, like lovers I never

  had time to enjoy, places

  I have never (yet) arrived.

  Snowflakes, my mother called them

  Snowflakes, my mother called them.

  My grandmother made papercuts

  until she wa
s too blind to see

  the intricate birds, trees, Mogen

  Davids, moons, flowers

  that appeared like magic

  when the folded paper

  was opened.

  My mother made simpler ones,

  abstract. She never saved them.

  Not hers, not mine.

  It was a winter game.

  Usually we had only newsprint

  to play with. Sometimes

  we used old wrapping paper,

  white sheets from the bakery.

  Often Grandma tacked hers

  to the walls or on the window

  that looked on the street,

  the east window where the sun

  rose hidden behind tenements

  where she faced to pray.

  I remember one with deer,

  delicate hooves, fine antlers

  for Pesach. Her animals were

  always in pairs, the rabbits,

  the cats, always cats in pairs,

  little mice, but never horses,

  for horses meant pogrom,

  the twice widowed woman’s

  sense of how things should be,

  even trees by twos for company.

  I had forgotten. I had lost it all

  until a woman sent me a papercut

  to thank me for a poem, and then

  in my hand I felt a piece of past

  materialize, a snowflake long melted,

  evaporated, cohering and once

  again long necked fragile deer

  stood, made of skill and absence.

  On Shabbat she dances in the candle flame

  How we danced then, you can’t imagine

  my grandmother said. We danced

  till we were dizzy, we danced

  till the room spun like a dreydl,

  we danced ourselves drunk and giddy,

  we danced till we fell panting.

  We were poor, my grandmother said,

  a few potatoes, some half rotten

  beans, greens from the hedgerow.

  But then on Shabbat we ate a chicken.

  The candles shone on the golden skin.

  We drank sweet wine and flew up to the ceiling.

  How I loved him, you can’t imagine

  my grandmother said. He was from St.

  Petersburg, my father could scarcely

  believe he was a Jew, he dressed so fine.

  His eyes burned when he looked at me.

  He quoted Pushkin instead of Mishnah.

  Nine languages and still the Czar

  wanted him in the Army, where Jews

  went off but never returned.

  My father married us from his deathbed.

  We escaped the Pale under a load of straw.

  You can’t imagine, we were frightened mice.

  Eleven children I bore, my grandmother said,

  nine who grew up, four who died

  before me. Now I sing in your ear.

  When you pray I stand beside you.

  Eliyahu’s cup at the seder table is for

  me, who cooked and never sat down:

  now I sit enthroned on your computer.

  Now I am the queen of dustmop tales,

  I preside over your memory lighting

  candles that summon the dead.

  I touch your lids while you sleep

  and when you wake, you imagine me.

  In the grip of the solstice

  Feels like a train roaring into night,

  the journey into fierce cold just beginning.

  The ground is newly frozen, the crust

  brittle and fancy with striations,

  steeples and nipples we break

  under our feet.

  Every day we are shortchanged a bit more,

  night pressing down on the afternoon

  throttling it. Wan sunrise later

  and later, every day trimmed

  like an old candle you beg to give

  an hour’s more light.

  Feels like hurtling into vast darkness,

  the sky itself whistling of space

  the black matter between stars

  the red shift as the light dies,

  warmth a temporary aberration,

  entropy as a season.

  Our ancestors understood the brute

  fear that grips us as the cold

  settles around us, closing in.

  Light the logs in the fireplace tonight,

  light the candles, first one, then two,

  the full chanukkiyah.

  Light the fire in the belly.

  Eat hot soup, cabbage and beef

  borsch, chicken soup, lamb

  and barley, stoke the marrow.

  Put down the white wine and pour

  whiskey instead.

  We reach for each other in our bed

  the night vaulted above us

  like a cave. Night in the afternoon,

  cold frosting the glass so it hurts

  to touch it, only flesh still

  welcoming to flesh.

  Woman in a shoe

  There was an old woman who lived

  in a shoe, her own two shoes,

  men’s they were, brown and worn.

  They flapped when she hobbled along.

  There was an old woman who lived

  in a refrigerator box under

  the expressway with her cat.

  January, they died curled together.

  There was an old woman who lived

  in a room under the roof. It

  got hot, but she was scared

  to open the window. It got hotter.

  Too hot, too cold, too poor,

  too old. Invisible unless

  she annoys you, invisible

  unless she gets in your way.

  In fairy tales if you are kind

  to an old woman, she gives you

  the thing you desperately need:

  an unconquerable sword, a purse

  bottomless and always filled,

  a magical ring. We don’t believe

  that anymore. Such tales were

  made up by old women scared

  to be thrust from the hearth,

  shoved into the street to starve.

  Who fears an old woman pushing

  a grocery cart? She is talking

  to god as she shuffles along,

  her life in her pockets. You

  are the true child of her heart

  and you see living garbage.

  Growing up haunted

  When I enter through the hatch of memory

  those claustrophobic chambers,

  my adolescence in the booming fifties

  of General Eisenhower, General Foods

  and General Motors, I see our dreams

  obsolescent mannequins in Dior frocks

  armored, prefabricated bodies;

  and I see our nightmares, powerful

  as a wine red sky and wall of fire.

  Fear was the underside of every leaf

  we turned, the knowledge that our

  cousins, our other selves, had been

  starved and butchered to ghosts.

  The question every smoggy morning

  presented like a covered dish:

  why are you living and all those

  mirror selves, sisters, gone

  into smoke like stolen cigarettes.

  I remember my grandmother’s cry

  when she learned the death of all she

  remembered, girls she bathed with,

  young men with whom she shyly

  flirted, wooden shul where

  her father rocked and prayed,

  red haired aunt plucking the

  balalaika, world of sun and snow

  turned to shadows on a yellow page.

  Assume no future you may not have

  to fight for, to die for, muttered

  ghosts gathered on the foot

  of m
y bed each night. What you

  carry in your blood is us,

  the books we did not write,

  music we could not make, a world

  gone from gristle to smoke, only

  as real now as words can make it.

  At the well

  Though I’m blind now and age

  has gutted me to rubbing bones

  knotted up in a leather sack

  like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.

  It happened near that well by Peniel

  where the water runs copper cold

  even in drought. Sore and dusty

  I was traveling my usual rounds

  wary of strangers—for some men

  think nothing of setting on any woman

  alone—doctoring a bit, setting bones,

  herbs and simples I know well,

  divining for water with a switch,

  selling my charms of odd shaped bones

  and stones with fancy names to less

  skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,

  a husband, or relief from one.

  The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.

  When I awoke at midnight it had come,

  a presence furious as a goat about to butt;

  amused as those yellow eyes

  sometimes seem just before

  the hind legs kick hard.

  The angel struck me

  and we wrestled all that night.

  My dust stained gristle of a body

  clad in proper village black

  was pushed against him

  and his fiery chest

  fell through me like a star.

  Raw with bruises, with my muscles

  sawing like donkey’s brays,

  I thought fighting can be like

  making love. Then in the grey

  placental dawn I saw.

  “I know you now, face

  on a tree of fire

 

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