by Marge Piercy
Off Alaska when humpback whales
leave in fall as the waters freeze
and the world turns white, heading
for mating grounds off Hawaii
and Mexico, certain whales remain.
What makes a creature stay when
almost all of its kind have moved on?
In burned-out areas of Detroit,
you’ll notice one house still wears
curtains, a bike locked to the porch.
Sometimes in the suburbs among
tract houses with carpets of grass
one farmhouse lurks, maybe even
with a barn. I imagine its owner
grey and stubborn, still growing
the best tomatoes for miles, refusing
to plant inedible grass, fighting
neighbors about her chickens,
a rooster who crows at four,
her clothesline a flag of defiance.
The constant exchange
The ocean gives; the ocean takes away.
I walked the old coast guard road many
afternoons, just behind the last dune.
Storms slammed it down, the waves
ate it entire with the whole front dune.
I remember a summer house where we
dined with friends several times, remember
how one winter it hung awkwardly half
over the cliff and then it was gone.
A lone pipe remained for another year.
On old maps the hills on the Bay called
Griffin Island, Bound Brook Island were
just that and now solid land. Only
marshes of reed and sedge seethe
and ebb where tall ships docked.
The sea is restless and greedy. It mocks
the summer people with their million
dollar houses with huge decks, vast
glass, chews them up to splinters, then
totes their flotsam away to dump on some
beach fifty miles distant as grey drift-
wood. Every spring we visit town beaches
to find the parking lot broken to rough
chunks, the stairs washed away. Ocean
takes no guff from us tiny creatures
but we get ours back by poisoning it.
May opens wide
The rain that came down last night
in sheets of shaken foil while thunder
trundled over the Bay and crooked
spears of lightning splintered trees
is rising now up stalks, lengthening
leaves that wave their new bright
banners tender as petals, seventeen
shades of green pushing into sun.
The soil feels sweet in my hands
as I push little marigolds in.
Bumblebees stir in the sour cherry
blossoms floating like pieces of moon
down to the red tulips beneath
the smooth barked tree where a red
squirrel chatters at my rescued tabby
who eyes him like a plate of lunch.
Wisteria can pull down a house
The wisteria means to creep over the world.
Every day its long tendrils wave in the breeze,
seize the bench under its arbor, weave
round the garden fence obstructing
the path. Its arbor’s long outgrown.
Such avidity. Such greed for dominance.
It has already killed the Siberian irises
it shadowed, stealing all their sun.
Should I admire or resent? Neither.
I go out with loppers and hack and hack.
If it could, it would twine around my neck
like a python; like an angry giant squid
it would pull me into a strangling embrace.
I will grow back, it swears, and outlive you.
Its vigor outdoes mine. It will succeed.
June 15th, 8 p.m.
The evening comes slowly over us,
over the cardinal and the wren still
feeding, over the swallows suddenly
swooping to snatch up mosquitoes
over the marsh where the green
sedge lately has a tawny tinge
over two yearlings bending long
necks to nibble hillock bushes
finally separate from their doe
mother. A late hawk is circling
against the sky streaked lavender.
The breeze has quieted, vanished
into leaves that still stir a bit
like a cat turning round before
sleep. Distantly a car passes
and is gone. Night gradually
unrolls from the east where
the ocean slides up and down
the sand leaving seaweed tassels:
a perfect world for moments.
Hard rain and potent thunder
An elephant herd of storm clouds
trample overhead. The air vibrates
electrically. The wind is rough
as hide scraping my face.
Longhaired rain occludes the pines.
This storm seems personal. We
crouch under the weight of the laden
air, feeling silly to be afraid.
Water comes sideways attacking
the shingles. The skylight drips.
We feel trapped in high surf
and buffeted. When the nickel
moon finally appears dripping
we are as relieved as if an in-
truder had threatened us and
then walked off with a shrug.
Ignorance bigger than the moon
A fly is knocking itself senseless
against the pane. That is, if a fly’s
brain is in its head. Lobsters
do not lodge the center
of their nervous system there
if one is to think of a fly
as an inconvenient lobster,
arthropods all. I’ve been reading
about the ways plants commu-
nicate by chemicals, wondering
if a tomato plant minds more
if a chipmunk bites into its fruit
or if I pick its ripe globes.
A moth is trapped between
the screen and closed window.
If I had super hearing like
a vampire, would I be bothered
by its screaming? The world
surrounds me with small
mysteries. How ignorant I am.
Or bigger ones. Does a tree
suffer when it’s chopped
down? Is earth weary of us
who poison it? Is she calling
even now to sister meteors?
I go through my muddled life
like a pebble pushed by currents
I don’t acknowledge. I notice
perhaps a hundredth of what
swarms about me on every side.
Yet if I could feel it all, hear
every whisper or cry, notice
all the faces in a crowded street,
would I really be wiser? or only
more confused, dumb and deafened.
Little house with no door
For decades it stood in the oak woods
not on any road but found only
by an old path half grown over:
a one-room house with no door
left to shut anyone out, windows
long bereft of glass, a few holes
in the roof where sky poked through.
I met a lover there one summer.
I had a tense political argument
with a fugitive there. A woman
who’d left her rich husband
for poverty spent two months
camped in it. Raccoons explored,
squirrels bopped in and out.
Rain sidled through the floor.
Once in a while someone or other
/>
made repairs till bloated houses
of summer people blocked access
and gradually it knelt down into
the forest floor and collapsed
taking all that history with it.
I never knew who built it way
into the woods, perhaps a hunter,
perhaps a hermit. Perhaps a ghost.
Still it sheltered with its ravaged
roof teenagers drinking and fucking,
romance and the end of it, and for whoever
most needed it, privacy, maybe peace.
There were no mountains in Detroit [haibun]
When I was a child, my parents would drive to Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, in soft coal country in the Appalachians a couple of times a year, often just as summer was ending—before school started. My father had grown up there and his sisters still lived in the narrow house resembling a red brick tombstone that stretched back from the highway where trucks groaned up the steep hill all night making me think of dinosaurs in books. I was never comfortable there, feeling alien, feeling very Jewish and judged, but I loved the mountains. When we left for home with my father at the wheel, early in the morning to reach Detroit the same day, there would always be fog, low clouds along the twisty highway. My father drove fast past the company coal towns, past the rock faces often stained with rust, the abandoned coke ovens, the mine entrances that looked foreboding where my uncle and second and third cousins worked under the mountains, the occasional stream dashing itself against rocks, the dark forests where my uncle Zimmy hunted deer on Sundays.
A cloud rests white on
a mountain’s shoulder: snow’s hand
on the back of fall.
But soon there will be none
The garden is oppressing me
with its rich bounty that is so
many debts to be paid. Tomatoes
I tucked into the ground up
to their hips in late April, little
miniature trees only so tall
as the space from wrist
to elbow, now they are shaggy
giants that tower over me.
They are laden like bizarre
Christmas trees with red,
with purple, yellow, pink,
orange and maroon fruit, all
to be gathered, heavy as
a small child in the basket.
All to be spread on platters
in the diningroom where we
dine with elbows tucked
in the two square feet they
leave us. Can, make into sauce,
Italian, hot, simple. Shove in
the dehydrator to make sweet
dry slices like candy. Freeze
as soup. Cook into chutney.
Fill the bathtub and jump in.
Force them down the cats.
And eat and eat and eat
and eat and eat. I dream
they are crawling through
the window into my bed
red and huge and hungry
where they’ll devour me.
Missing, missed
We lived in the same brownstone in Brooklyn, shared clothes, meals, chores. We each had a man who went into Manhattan. We got political together, joined groups protesting the war. We danced to the new relevant rock. We ogled the longhaired men like lustful angels who blossomed suddenly everyplace. Our marriages loosened and we spilled out.
Sometimes we shared lovers. Sometimes you stole men I was flirting with. Finally we made love and you fled into something that felt less dangerous but wasn’t.
After a few years of silence, we began to write from opposite coasts and you came to visit me. A whirlwind of fragments of undealt with past spun around you till the air was heavy with noise and flying objects.
Every six months you found true love. You met a charismatic Mexican politico and followed him to Paris. And disappeared. No address, no internet presence, no Facebook, all connections broken. No one knew what had happened to you, dead or alive.
Darkness swirls
a hole still darker
no one there
Death’s charming face
I greet dragonflies zipping
into the garden like fighter planes
glinting red, turquoise, transparent
as they attack their prey.
Why are predators often gorgeous?
The tiger prowling like striped silk
rippling: the leopard, ocelot,
the polar most beautiful of bears.
Even sharks have their streamlined
aesthetic. Moon snails that drill
clams to death have shells
beachgoers seek to collect.
Pythons are patterned like Oriental
rugs. Hawks we find majestic
as they soar tiny and crying
mate to mate, then dive talons
outstretched to mangle their prey.
How often women have dashed
themselves senseless on killers
in anthems and arias of blood.
The frost moon
The frost moon like a stone wheel
rolls up the sky. The grass is tipped,
the green life pressed out of weeds
and flowers alike.
A morning powdered with white
and then as the sun inches up
into the trees, glitter. Sequins
rhinestones, broken glass.
Finally it dissolves into the air
leaving stalks that look scorched,
a rim of ice in the shadows,
dry wigs of petals.
The birds mob the feeders.
No moths, no flies, no hoppers
just an occasional bright or drab
leaf eddying down.
Sun still warms the skin or fur
through glass, but the outside
air bites the nose and ears,
the wind whispers hunger.
At night we feel the earth
like a fast freight train hurtling
into the darkness that closes
around us like a tunnel.
December arrives like an unpaid bill
The moon is a fishhook of bone.
Shoals of grey clouds dart past it.
Occasionally one seems to catch
and hang. Tomorrow it will be bigger
sticking like a slice of cantaloupe
out of the sea. Every day less sun
as it crawls out of the seabed later
and sinks into the hill of pines
long before supper. The birds turn
avid at the feeders. The flocks
of wild turkeys grow, the tom
collecting his harem if he pleases
them, or they’ll drift to another.
The tail of the red fox is bushy
and he hunts earlier. Every tree
even the stubborn oaks that
clutched tight to their ragged
brown leaves are stripped,
turned to wooden bouquets.
Time to haul wood for the fire.
Time to heap more protection
on the hardy parsnips and pluck
the last nubs of Brussels sprouts
and pull the kale leaves like tough
green lace and dig the final leeks.
Batten down, hill up, stow. We’re
heading out into the stormy seas
of winter, no safe harbor in sight.
III
The poor are no longer with us
The suicide of dolphins
No one, not even the scientists who study
you, knows why you beach yourselves
whole family groups, communities
on our beige sand to gasp and die
unless the volunteers, called phone
to phone quickly in a spiderweb
of summoning, can keep you wet
and push you into deep water again
like shoving a
huge wet sofa. Some
think it’s disease or following your
leader into danger or chasing fish
into water too shallow so you run
aground. An old fisherman said to
me, they remember how they used
to live on the land, they remember.
We know nothing but still we grieve.
Is your act any more opaque than a friend
who drinks himself into a fiery crash?
Another who burnt his brain to a crisp
on crack; the woman who could not
walk out on her husband even after the fifth
trip to the emergency ward, leaving only
feet first when he shot her? Or my friend’s
daughter who hanged herself at fifteen
because of names she was called,
because of words on a computer
screen, because of a boy. We cannot
stop each other but still we grieve.
The poor are no longer with us
No one’s poor any longer. Listen
to politicians. They mourn the middle
class which is shrinking as we watch
