by Marge Piercy
ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
POETRY
The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems
The Crooked Inheritance
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water (Selected poems)
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett and Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
NOVELS
Sex Wars
The Third Child
Three Women
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives (republished 2013)
Vida (republished 2011)
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep (republished 2012)
Small Changes
OTHER
The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (A collection of short stories)
Pesach for the Rest of Us
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and Personal Narrative (with Ira Wood), 1st & 2nd editions
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (Essays)
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (Anthology)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright 2015 © by Marge Piercy
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Original publication information for the previously published poems included in this collection is located on this page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Piercy, Marge.
[Poems. Selections]
Made in Detroit : poems / Marge Piercy. — First edition.
pages; cm
“This is a Borzoi Book.”
ISBN 978-0-385-35388-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-35389-2 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8566.I4A6 2015
811’.54—dc23
2014026429
Jacket image: Library, courtesy of Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
I Made in Detroit
Made in Detroit
The frontroom
Detroit, February 1943
Things that will never happen here again
Detroit fauna
Family vacation to Yellowstone
The rented lakes of my childhood
Thirteen
She held forth
The scent of apple cake
By the river of Detroit
The street that was
City bleeding
Mehitabel & me
What my mother gave me
Our neverending entanglement
Ashes in their places
II Ignorance bigger than the moon
January orders
We have come through
How I gained respect for night herons
Remnants still visible
The constant exchange
May opens wide
Wisteria can pull down a house
June 15th, 8 p.m.
Hard rain and potent thunder
Ignorance bigger than the moon
Little house with no door
There were no mountains in Detroit [haibun]
But soon there will be none
Missing, missed
Death’s charming face
The frost moon
December arrives like an unpaid bill
III The poor are no longer with us
The suicide of dolphins
The poor are no longer with us
Don’t send dead flowers
A hundred years since the Triangle Fire
Ethics for Republicans
Another obituary
What it means
How have the mighty …
We know
The passion of a fan
In pieces
Ghosts
One of the expendables
Let’s meet in a restaurant
My time in better dresses
Come fly without me
These bills are long unpaid
Hope is a long, slow thing
IV Working at it
The late year
Erev New Years
Head of the year
May the new year continue our joy
Late that afternoon they come
N’eilah
The wall of cold descends
How she learned
Working at it
The order of the seder
The two cities
Where silence waits
I say Kaddish but still mourn
V That was Cobb Farm
Little diurnal tragedies
The next evolutionary step
That was Cobb Farm
They meet
A cigarette left smoldering
Discovery motion
Sun in January
Little rabbit’s dream song
Different voices, one sentence
Cotton’s wife
That summer day
Insomniac prayer at 2 a.m.
The body in the hot tub
VI Looking back in utter confusion
Looking back in utter confusion
Why did the palace of excess have cockroaches?
In the Peloponnesus one April afternoon
The end not yet in sight
Loving clandestinely
The visible and the in-
What’s left
Corner of Putnam and Pearl
Bang, crash over
Sins of omission
Even if we try not to let go
Afterward
The wonder of it
Marinade for an elderly rabbit
Contemplating my breasts
Words hard as stones
Absence wears out the heart
A republic of cats
What do they expect?
Decades of intimacy creating
We used to be close, I said
A wind suddenly chills you
Why she frightens me
My sweetness, my desire
They come, they go in the space of a breath
In storms I can hear the surf a mile away
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
I
Made in Detroit
Made in Detroit
My first lessons were kisses and a hammer.
I was fed with mother’s milk and rat poison.
I learned to walk on a tightrope over a pit
where snakes’ warnings were my rattles.
The night I was born the sky burned
red
over Detroit and sirens sharpened their knives.
The elms made tents of solace over grimy
streets and alley cats purred me to sleep.
I dived into books and their fables
closed over my head and hid me.
Libraries were my cathedrals. Librarians
my priests promising salvation.
I was formed by beating like a black
smith’s sword, and my edge is still
sharp enough to cut both you and me.
I sought love in dark and dusty corners
and sometimes I even found it
however briefly. Every harsh, every
tender word entered my flesh and lives
there still, bacteria inside my gut.
I suckled Detroit’s steel tits. When
I escaped to college I carried it with
me, shadow and voice, pressure
that hardened me to coal and flame.
The frontroom
In the tiny livingroom of my parents’ house
that my mother, brought up in tenements
always called the frontroom, stood
a maroon couch with rough itchy
upholstery that marked my tender
thighs if ever I sat on it.
On every surface, wooden shoes,
Eiffel tower, leather teepee,
ceramic dolls in costume—
souvenirs of places they had
gone or she wished she had.
She hated an empty space.
Emptiness meant poverty. With
money she would have collected
paintings, objets d’art which these
were to her, emblems of times away
from our asbestos shack where she
imagined a richer life. Out of library
books, images like genii rose murmuring
your wish is my etcetera. But she
commanded nothing except my child
labor rubbing, scrubbing what could
never be clean, as factory soot
drifted down like ebony snow.
Detroit, February 1943
When there was wind, it found
every crack and chink in the walls.
On winter mornings, the windows
were etched with landscapes
of frost eerie and delicate.
Rising from my cold bed
into the cold room, my clothes
laid out for school stiff, rustling
with cold, I would run to stand
over the hot air register, hoping
the furnace had been fed coal.
My father’s cigarette cough
rattled from their room.
I smelled oatmeal. Once we
ate it for three weeks of hunger.
My clothes were shaped
by other bodies, my books
had corners turned down,
notes I could not read.
Rummage sales were our malls.
My mother fed birds, talking
with them as they flew to perch
near her, leftovers, stale bread,
crumbs. We too survived
on what no one else wanted.
Things that will never happen here again
I remember hauling carpets out to the clothes
lines in the yard and knocking the dust out
in great cough-making clouds with wire
carpet beaters like diagrams of cellos.
Defrosting the refrigerator required much
boiling of water on the stove and flat pans
into which fingers of ice fell. Every five
minutes water cooled and needed refilling.
The coal truck came and down the chute
into the coal bin the black rocks
clattered and thundered. The floors
upstairs shook in a local quake.
The furnace with its many arms lurked
in the basement and every few days
clinkers must be removed, often still
smoking, and ashes hauled out.
During the war we collected cans
and stomped them underfoot, handing
them in. We bundled newspapers,
magazines for distant factories.
I miss none of this. They were chores
not pleasures, but still I remember
and my age hangs on me like icicles
that bear down the branches of pine.
Detroit fauna
I am old enough to remember the sad
horses that pulled open-sided carts
loaded with vegetables and fruit,
the knife sharpener’s whirring stone,
the rag man in the alley, the closed
dripping wagon of the ice man.
They were always brown or grey.
They walked and stopped, walked
on then stopped, their heads bowed
under the burden of dragging
heaviness across hot asphalt, day
after day for what scant reward?
Police horses are bigger and glossy.
I never pitied them when they
charged us. They were the enemy
grim as war horses that snuffled
fire as they trampled the infantry,
stallions bred to die on pikes.
Even the glass bottles of milk
were carried to our breakfasts
by horses. The photographer
went house to house with his pony
black and white spotted, adorned
with bells, but the working stiffs
never had tails plaited or manes
brushed out. I spoke to them
and their red-rimmed eyes would
turn to me. Then off they would clop
clop in the harness we were
each supposed to grow into.
Family vacation to Yellowstone
I kept a diary my twelfth summer
when we took our first long trip
since before the war. I wrote up
every meal, a skinny pale blue
child with sprouting sore breasts
I slumped to hide. Always hungry.
“For lunch at a place called The
Green Frog I had fried cat
fish, corn bread and mashed
potatoes. For dessert I ate
strawberry ice cream!! It
was all very delicious.”
Besides every piece of food
I mentioned only animals. An owl
tethered at a restaurant in Frankenmuth
Michigan, an owl called Jerry
a woman bathed and dried.
I described a horse who whinnied
at me over a fence in Wyoming.
I lovingly listed cattle and eagles,
antelope and elk, bison. Animals
I trusted as frightened children
do. My father’s temper. My mother’s
anger. I would have run away
with a wolf pack. In Yellowstone
I decided my future as a ranger.
I would live among pine trees
and follow bison through
the tall grass. We met a man
who lived up in a fire tower
and I wanted to become him.
I wanted a tower not like Rapunzel
to coax a lover to climb,
but to rise up and hide, high
above smoky buzzing Detroit
streets, the tiny asbestos shack
thrumming with unpaid bills
and the marriage of the cat
and dog with their unloved
offspring thin as a knife—
all of us with edges that
made each other bleed.
The rented lakes of my childhood
I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
v
acations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.
Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.
Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water
that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe
coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer’s plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.
And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.
Thirteen
The girl was closed on herself
tight as a winter bud on a sugar
maple, protecting what lay within.
She imagined herself a foundling—
secret offspring of some kind, rich
parents, but the mirror contradicted.
Her shoulders hunched over newly
sprouted breasts sour as crab
apples and as hard to the touch.
Her shoulders hunched over dreams
cradled within like wet birds
just broken free of the eggshell.
