by Marge Piercy
strewn with human waste and poison,
the trash of boats and cities,
the nets and shipping, known to us,
pod and matrilineal descent, travels
and fate. One community encompasses
this fragile fawn-colored coil of sand
and the vast and roiling Gulf Stream river
and all finny, furred and feathered who dwell therein.
If we cannot preserve the greatest of these
then we will surely follow that shape of natural power
into the silence after its murdered song,
the sea lapping like heavy oil at beaches
where plastic shards cast up on the stained sand.
Sexual selection among birds
The soft breasted dun bird on her nest
incubating a clutch of sand colored eggs,
her dreams are scarlet and cobalt.
Her mate is gaudy, enameled like
a Fabergé egg, jeweled and singing:
the artifact of her aesthetic lust.
Over the bower of bush where she waits
he dances in the air, mine, mine:
but she knows better.
Of all the females, she, feathered
dinosaur, is the choosiest, the most
critical, demanding of her mate
not only fidelity, passion, offspring
but that he sing like Mozart
and bloom like a perfect rose.
Shad blow
1.
Deer tracks cloven dark in the pale sand.
The grey squirrels shriek and chase each other
crashing from branch to branch of the oaks.
The shad bloom is late this year and perfect,
trees that are one great composite flower,
wild carrots, Queen Anne’s lace the size
of giraffes riffled by the breeze
miles of salt have scrubbed
bone white. Orange and lemon orioles
flit among knotted branches. The trunks
of shad are grey, blotched with lichen,
fog caught and woven into wood.
2.
I used to lie under the sour cherry in the narrow
yard of the house where we moved the year
I turned fifteen. White galaxies that would become
wine by summer’s end, pies in the sky,
flashed against the sulfurous clouds of Detroit—
blossoms out of mahogany bark shining.
Who will I be? The will to love
ate holes in my mind. I was riddled
like a sieve with sharp sour desires.
I can taste that raw homemade wine,
taste a sweet and sour intoxicating pain
so empty, wanting played shrilly on me
like the wind over the mouth of a bottle
compelling a keening too high pitched
for a human to notice, but the dog next
door flung back his head and howled too
and my cat came stepping through the unmown
grass to circle three times, then marked
the tree with his spray as I burned
to mark the world with something of mine.
Spring came on like cramps in a growing body.
3.
In spring I raise my head to sniff at scents.
I want to be out by the river watching the ale
wives straddling the current, humping upstream.
I thrust my hands into the cool rich soil,
the moss like fur between cracks of the bricks.
I want to roll like a big dog and shake free.
The salamander cool as jelly, darkly colored
as cabernet sauvignon lies on my palm
then leaps to freedom, snap, in the woodpile.
Appetite licks at the air, the tiny leaves
opening their clenched silken banners.
At two in the afternoon the fox runs on the beach
going to paw at the late alewives crossing
the bar where the brook eases into the bay.
A gull runs at him, then flaps off.
Once I thought the seasons were mine,
moods, passions, itches I could scratch,
voids I could fill with other’s bodies.
Now I know I am in the seasons, of them.
The sun warms the upturned soil and my arm.
Spring moves through me like an armada of light.
Report of the 14th Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group
This is how things begin to tilt into change,
how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,
of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,
how people ease into action arguing each inch,
but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.
Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,
the length. Let us discuss whether we will sit
or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying
down. Let us argue about the chair and the table and
the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.
In the room fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens
in every brain. Let us form committees spawning
subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.
Under the grey fluorescent sun they will crack
to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.
The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.
The earth tilts on its axis. More and more snows
fall each winter and less melt each spring.
A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward
over the floor. We watch the wall of ice advance.
We are evolving into molluscs, barnacles
clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke
while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric
inches up the shingles and dawdles back.
This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,
to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck
wrestling to some momentary small agreement
like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.
I believe in this democracy as I believe
there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me
lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs
to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand
and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.
No more committees but only picnics and orgies
and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.
True romance
In a room with a nylon carpet and a daybed
a woman is dancing with her eyes on the TV set.
The face of the singer gluts. For her
he is singing, this face more familiar
than any lover’s, this man she has carried
wrapped like a chocolate in the crisp paper
of her heart since she was fifteen.
She loves him, she loves him, for him
she dances, thrusting her hips, arms reaching,
churning her mons at his face bigger than
the face of her husband and closer,
more real than the smell of her own sweat.
O sunbright hero whose strut is paid for
by Japanese cars, by computers, by lite beer.
O lithe bodies the camera fills with buttercream
of wishes, bodies thin and flawless as blank paper,
bodies with nipples and navels taped, bodies
on which the clothes are glued, faces coated
with polyurethane, how many men paw at their
wives’ flesh trying to unearth your vinyl.
Things move fast in that bright world. A man
sees a woman across a room and she smiles
only at him. After a diet soda commercial,
she is in bed with him. In the next scene
she is gone a
nd his buddy the talking dog
goes at his side. Then the cars chase each other
off cliffs into balls of flame. The hero
steps out with a grin promising he will unzip
you, walk into the set of your head, turn up
the brightness and volume control till you
become real too, as the box glued to your eyes.
Woman in the bushes
A snail easing gingerly
tasting the morning’s dangers with soft
gelatinous eyestalks probing
she shuffles forward, her only house
her back bearing all her clothes
and her shopping cart piled with
blanket roll, her Sterno, pan and bottle,
her photographs wilted like flowers.
This fall she sleeps in a rhodo-
dendron thicket in the park,
withdrawing deep among the leathery
leaves when twilight makes of grass
a minefield of exploding boys.
While the joggers prance past,
the cyclists in neon gear,
she wriggles out, washes
at a fountain, fills her bottle.
In the hollow among oaks shedding
she squats where the police
cannot see and heats beans.
Nothing human separates
us like comfort.
A local doctor describes a body dead
of exposure last winter: multiparous,
more than one child delivered.
Her teeth revealed a life once affluent.
Hunger sucked her like a spider.
We despise what isn’t new. We toss
half of what we buy. Things are made
to break and we discard them. Excess
people take longer to get rid of
but they biodegrade nicely.
It just takes time and weather.
Apple sauce for Eve
Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,
damned for your curiosity: for your sin
was wanting knowledge. To try, to taste,
to take into the body, into the brain
and turn each thing, each sign, each factoid
round and round as new facets glint and white
fractures into colors and the image breaks
into crystal fragments that pierce the nerves
while the brain casts the chips into patterns.
Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,
dares existence, blows a horn in the ear
of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats
of real questions into the still air
of the desiccated parlor of stasis.
What we all know to be true, constant,
melts like frost landscapes on a window
in a jet of steam. How many last words
in how many dead languages would translate into,
But what happens if I, and Whoops!
We see Adam wagging his tail, good dog, good
dog, while you and the snake shimmy up the tree,
lab partners in a dance of will and hunger,
that thirst not of the flesh but of the brain.
Men always think women are wanting sex,
cock, snake, when it is the world she’s after.
Then birth trauma for the first conceived kid
of the ego, I think therefore I am, I
kick the tree, who am I, why am I,
going, going to die, die, die.
You are indeed the mother of invention,
the first scientist. Your name means
life: finite, dynamic, swimming against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like any other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple,
the seeds were freedom and the flowering of choice.
The Book of Ruth and Naomi
When you pick up the Tanakh and read
the Book of Ruth, it is a shock
how little it resembles memory.
It’s concerned with inheritance,
lands, men’s names, how women
must wiggle and wobble to live.
Yet women have kept it dear
for the beloved elder who
cherished Ruth, more friend than
daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth
brought even the baby she made
with Boaz home as a gift.
Where you go, I will go too,
your people shall be my people,
I will be a Jew for you,
for what is yours I will love
as I love you, oh Naomi
my mother, my sister, my heart.
Show me a woman who does not dream
a double, heart’s twin, a sister
of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,
whose hair she can braid as her life
twists its pleasure and pain and shame.
Show me a woman who does not hide
in the locket of bone that deep
eye beam of fiercely gentle love
she had once from mother, daughter,
sister; once like a warm moon
that radiance aligned the tides
of her blood into potent order.
At the season of first fruits we remember
those travelers, coconspirators, scavengers
making do with leftovers and mill ends,
whose friendship was stronger than fear,
stronger than hunger, who walked together
down death’s dusty road, hands joined.
Of the patience called forth by transition
Notice how the sky is a milky opal
cloudless from rim to rim, of an indefinite
height and sliding now at midafternoon
into darkness. Pearly, it melts
imperceptibly into yellow and green,
willow colors from another season,
or the yellow of aspen leaves already fallen,
into lavender now, the sea lavender
shriveled in the marshes. As the trees
reduce themselves to bony gesture
and the woods echo the hues of earth
itself, the colors of the light must feed
our eye’s hunger, the ruddy sun of winter.
In early spring, we look down for color,
we look for the green of skunk cabbage,
golden crocuses along the south wall,
the small ears of violets unfolding.
Before the snows that glaze and magnify,
glitter and transmute, we look upward.
Great Chinese peonies float over the bay
splendid, bronzed by the light rebounding
from the water. In November we gaze up
into the stormy garden of the clouds.
What comes to us rides on the wind
and we face into it like gulls, waiting.
I have always been poor at flirting
I know it’s harmless. My friends who flirt
the hardest—consummate, compulsive—are least
apt to fall into bed on a hot night’s wind.
Flirting is what they do instead of sex,
five-year affairs of eyes and telephone trysts,
voices soft as warm taffy, artful laughs,
a hush when the spouse walks through the room.
Yet when I flirt I feel like an elephant
in a pink tutu balancing on a beach ball,
a tabby wearing a doll’s dress, stuffed
in a carriage, about to snarl and slash.
I am pretending to be a girl, a girly girl.
A smile hangs on my face like a loose shutter.
My voice is petroleum jelly on my tongue.
My mother flirted with the milkman, the iceman,
&nb
sp; the butcher—oh he winked and strutted,
flashing his gold tooth and slapping the scale.
Ogling, the plumber fixed both leaks
for the price of one. She flirted with the mailman,
the paperboy who brought our paper and only ours
to the door. I’d watch sour as a rotten lemon,
dour as a grandfather clock, cringing, muttering
Mother! like the curse word it was. The walls
would drip perfumed oil. The ceiling sagged buttery.
Her eyes were screwed wide open, Betty Boop,
batting butterfly wings, her mouth pursed,
while she played them like saxophones,
her voice now a tiny plush mouse,
now sleeking into the lower registers
of dark honey lapping at the belly.
When we couldn’t pay the mortgage, she almost
climbed into the bank manager’s lap.
Motorcycle cops pulling over our sputtering car,
teachers, principals, my father’s bosses,
she had only one weapon, shameless silent
promises redeemable for absolutely nothing
but an ego job on the spot, frothing over.
If afterward she called them behayma,
fool, it was with quiet satisfaction,
an athlete who has performed well and won.
I remember the puzzled damaged look in her
widened eyes when flirting began to fail.
For some it is a drug of choice,
a moment’s cocaine spiking the ego, giving
that spurt of a mirror cooing attraction.
For me it means only, I am powerless,
you can hurt or help me, wedged there above,
so I attempt this awkward dance of the broken
fan and the mud colored bubble, among your teeth.
