by Marge Piercy
She is awkwardly lovely, her face
pure as a single trill perfectly
prolonged on a violin, yet she
knows the camera sees her
and she arranges her body
like a flower in a vase to be
displayed, admired she hopes.
She longs to be luminous
and visible, to shine in the eyes
of it must be a handsome man,
who will carry her away—and he
will into poverty and an abortion
but not yet. Now she drapes
her best, her only good dress
inherited from her sister who dances
on the stage, around her legs
that she does not like
and leans a little forward
because she does like her breasts.
How she wants love to bathe
her in honeyed light lifting her
up through smoky clouds clamped
on the Pittsburgh slum. Blessed
are we who cannot know
what will come to us,
our upturned faces following
through the sky
the sun of love.
One reason I like opera
In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.
In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.
Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.
Let’s go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.
The tenor the women scream for
wolfs an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.
Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.
The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.
The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano’s
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and Black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.
What you see is work like digging a ditch,
hard physical labor. What you hear
is magic as tricky as knife throwing.
What you see is strength like any
great athlete’s; what you hear
is skill rendered precisely as the best
Swiss watchmaker. The body is
resonance. The body is the cello case.
The body just is. The voice loud
as hunger remagnetizes your bones.
My mother gives me her recipe
Take some flour. Oh, I don’t know,
like two–three cups, and you cut
in the butter. Now some women
they make it with shortening.
but I say butter, even though
that meant you had to have fish, see?
You cut up some apples. Not those
stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake,
they have to have some bite, you know?
A little sour in the sweet, like love.
You slice them into little moons.
No, no! Like half or crescent
moons. You aren’t listening.
You mix sugar and cinnamon and cloves,
some women use allspice. You coat
every little moon. Did I say you add
milk? Oh, just till it feels right.
Use your hands. Milk in the cake part!
Then you pat it into a pan, I like
round ones, but who cares?
I forgot to say you add baking powder.
Did I forget a little lemon on the apples?
Then you just bake it. Well, till it’s done
of course. Did I remember you place
the apples in rows? You can make
a pattern, like a weave. It’s pretty
that way. I like things pretty.
It’s just a simple cake.
Any fool can make it
except your aunt. I
gave her the recipe
but she never
got it right.
The good old days at home sweet home
On Monday my mother washed.
It was the way of the world,
all those lines of sheets flapping
in the narrow yards of the neighborhood,
the pulleys stretching out second
and third floor windows.
Down in the dank steamy basement,
washtubs vast and grey, the wringer
sliding between the washer
and each tub. At least every
year she or I caught
a hand in it.
Tuesday my mother ironed.
One iron was the mangle.
She sat at it feeding in towels,
sheets, pillowcases.
The hand ironing began
with my father’s underwear.
She ironed his shorts.
She ironed his socks.
She ironed his undershirts.
Then came the shirts
a half hour to each, the starch
boiling on the stove.
I forget blueing. I forget
the props that held up the line
clattering down. I forget
chasing the pigeons that shat
on her billowing housedresses.
I forget clothespins in the teeth.
Tuesday my mother ironed my
father’s underwear. Wednesday
she mended, darned socks on
a wooden egg. Shined shoes.
Thursday she scrubbed floors.
Put down newspapers to keep
them clean. Friday she
vacuumed, dusted, polished,
scraped, waxed, pummeled.
How did you become a feminist
interviewers always ask
as if to say, when did this
rare virus attack your brain?
It could have been Sunday
when she washed the windows,
Thursday when she burned
the trash, bought groceries
hauling the heavy bags home.
It could have been any day
she did again and again what
time and dust obliterated
at once until stroke broke
her open. I think it was Tuesday
when she ironed my father’s shorts.
The day my mother died
I seldom have premonitions of death.
That day opened like any
ordinary can of tomatoes.
The alarm drilled into my ear.
The cats stirred and one leapt off.
The scent of coffee slipped into my head
like a lover into my arms and I sighed,
drew the curtains and examined
the face of the day.
I remember no dreams of loss.
No dark angel rustled ominous win
gs
or whispered gravely.
I was caught by surprise
like the trout that takes the fly
and I gasped in the fatal air.
You were gone suddenly as a sound
fading in the coil of the ear
no trace, no print, no ash
just the emptiness of stilled air.
My hunger feeds on itself.
My hands are stretched out
to grasp and find only their
own weight bearing them down
toward the dark cold earth.
Love has certain limited powers
The dead walk with us briefly,
suddenly just behind on the narrow
path like a part in the hairy grass.
We feel them between our shoulder
blades and we can speak, but if
we turn, like Eurydice they’re gone.
The dead lie with us briefly
swimming through the warm salty
pool of darkness flat as flounders,
floating like feathers on the shafts
of silver moonlight. Their hair
brushes our face and is gone.
The dead speak to us through
the scent of red musk roses,
through steam rising from green tea,
through the spring rain scratching
on the pane. If I try to recapture
your voice, silence grates
in my ears, the mocking rush
of silence. But months later
I stand at the stove stirring a pot
of soup and you say, Too much salt,
and you say, You have my hair,
and, Pain wears out like anything else.
Little lights
Tonight I light the first candle
on the chanukiyah by the window
and then a second in the bathtub,
the yahrzeit candle for your death.
I am always sad the first night
of a holiday when we should rejoice.
This night nineteen years ago
the light of your mind snuffed out.
The Chanukkah candles burn quickly
two hours and they gutter out
their short time burnt up.
We did not know how old you were—
you’d always fudged your age,
you had no birth certificate—
I don’t know if you knew
your birth date and place, for real.
Grandma always gave a different
answer and then shrugged. Your
mother is younger than me and
older than you, what else matters?
Yes, there’s Moses and David,
Babylon and the Talmud,
Maimonides, and then we appear
out of a cloud of smoke and haze
of old blood there among the Jew-
haters clutching a few bundles.
My people poor, without names,
histories vanished into the hard soil
but we had stories with pedigrees:
my female ancestors told them,
Lilith, the golem, Rabbi Nachman,
the Maccabees, all simultaneous
all swarming around my bed
all caught in my hair as you
washed it with tar soap, relating
fables, family gossip, bubele
maisehs, precious handed down
the true family jewels, my dowry.
Those little flames you lit in my
mind burn on paper for you,
your true yahrzeit, all year
every year of my aging life.
Gifts that keep on giving
You know when you unwrap them:
fruitcake is notorious. There were only
51 of them baked in 1917 by the
personal chef of Rasputin. The mad monk
ate one. That was what finally killed him
But there are many more bouncers:
bowls green and purple spotted like lepers.
Vases of inept majolica in the shape
of wheezing frogs or overweight lilies.
Sweaters sized for Notre Dame’s hunchback.
Hourglasses of no use humans
can devise. Gloves to fit three-toed sloths.
Mufflers of screaming plaid acrylic.
Necklaces and pins that transform
any outfit to a thrift shop reject.
Boxes of candy so stale and sticky
the bonbons pull teeth faster than
your dentist. Weird sauces bought
at warehouse sales no one will ever
taste unless suicidal or blind.
Immortal as vampires, these gifts
circulate from birthdays to Christmas,
from weddings to anniversaries.
Even if you send them to the dump,
they resurface, bobbing up on the third
day like the corpses they call floaters.
After all living have turned to dust
and ashes, in the ruins of cities
alien archeologists will judge our
civilization by these monstrous relics.
The yellow light
When I see—obsolete, forgotten—
a yellow porchlight, I am transported
to muggy Michigan evenings.
The air is thick with July.
We are playing pinochle.
Every face card is a relative.
Now we are playing Hearts
but I am the Queen of Spades.
Mosquitoes hum over the weedy
lake. An owl groans in the pines.
Moths hurl themselves against
the screens, a dry brown rain.
Yellow makes every card black.
The eyes of my uncles are avid.
They are playing for pennies
and blood. One shows off
a new Buick, one a new wife.
The women are whispering
about bellies and beds.
It always smells like fried perch.
I am afraid I will never grow up.
I think the owl is calling me
over the black water to hide
in the pines and turn, turn
into something strange and dark
with wings and talons and words
of a more powerful language
than uncles and aunts know,
than uncles and aunts understand.
The new era, c. 1946
It was right after the war of my childhood
World War II, and the parks were wide open.
The lights were all turned on, house
lights, streetlights, neon like green
and purple blood pumping the city’s heart.
I had grown up in brownout, blackout,
my father the air raid warden going
house to house to check that no pencil
of light stabbed out between blackout curtains.
Now it was summer and Detroit was celebrating.
Fireworks burst open their incandescent petals
flaring in arcs down into my wide eyes.
A band was playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Then the lights came on brighter and starker
than day and sprayers began to mist the field.
It was the new miracle DDT in which we danced
its faint perfumy smell like privet along the sidewalks.
It was comfort in mist, for there would be no more
mosquitoes forever, and we would always be safe.
Out in Nevada soldiers were bathing in fallout.
People downwind of the tests were drinking
heavy water out of their faucets. Cancer
was the rising sign in the neon painted night.
Little birds fell out of the trees but no one
noticed. We had so many birds then.
In Europe American cigarettes were money.
Here all
the kids smoked on street corners.
I used to light kitchen matches with my thumbnail.
My parents threw out their Depression ware
and bought Melmac plastic dishes.
They believed in plastic and the promise
that when they got old, they would go
to Florida and live like the middle class.
My brother settled in California with a new
wife and his old discontent. New car,
new refrigerator, Mama and Daddy have new hats.
Crouch and cover. Ashes, all fall down.
Winter promises
Tomatoes rosy as perfect babies’ buttocks,
eggplants glossy as waxed fenders,
purple neon flawless glistening
peppers, pole beans fecund and fast
growing as Jack’s Viagra-sped stalk,
big as truck tire zinnias that mildew
will never wilt, roses weighing down
a bush never touched by black spot,
brave little fruit trees shouldering up
their spotless ornaments of glass fruit:
I lie on the couch under a blanket
of seed catalogs ordering far
too much. Sleet slides down
the windows, a wind edged
with ice knifes through every crack.
Lie to me, sweet garden-mongers:
I want to believe every promise,
to trust in five pound tomatoes
and dahlias brighter than the sun
that was eaten by frost last week.
The gardener’s litany
We plant, it is true.
I start the tiny seedlings
in peat pots, water, feed.
But the garden is alive
in the night with its own
adventures. Slugs steal
out, snails carry their
