by Marge Piercy
we must touch each base
of the haggadah as we pass,
blessing, handwashing,
dipping this and that. Voices
half harmonize on the brukhahs.
Dear faces like a multitude
of moons hang over the table
and the truest brief blessing:
affection and peace that we make.
The two cities
L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim
we say every Pesach, concluding
the haggadah. Some say it piously,
some with pride, some almost
embarrassed, some with mixed
feelings, some balk at the words.
In the murderous times that came
down so often in the Diaspora,
it was said with fervent hope
that some where, some time
we could, would belong, be
free. But Jerusalem, the golden,
the city on the hill, is two
cities, one blood-soaked, fought
over for millennia, again, again.
The other is a city of the mind.
Utopia comes as a walled garden
or as a city, a community of peace
we have never reached, where
justice and equality are daily
as water and still as precious.
May we always travel onward
toward that good place even
if like Moses we never arrive
struggling through dust and blood
to unite the two Jerusalems
in one shining city of peace.
Where silence waits
How hard it is to keep Shabbat,
to stop what crams days, evenings
like a hoarder’s house and to thrust
every worry, duty, command,
every list of What Is To Be Done
into a mental closet and bolt
that door. We feel half guilty
not to be multitasking.
Surely this space we eke out
is indulgence. Where’s
the end product? How can we
walk into silence like a pond?
The computer, the smart phone,
the fax machine summon us
to attend to shrill voices. How
can we justify being idle?
How can we listen to that voice
that issues only from deep
stillness and silence? How
can we ever afford not to?
I say Kaddish but still mourn
Tonight I light the first skinny candles
of celebration and the single fat
candle of grieving, for this first
night is my mother’s yahrzeit too.
I say Kaddish that never mentions
death but in me is a hole that never
quite healed over, that sweet lonely
scar of missing that goes on
year after year singing its husky
lament for a tattered life, for lone-
liness inside an asbestos bungalow
where she cleaned and cleaned
and cleaned what could never
be clean, in the fog of acid
and smoke from the factories.
All that was white yellowed.
All that was right passed away.
All that had been soft hardened
to shards of shattered hopes.
All that was promised her, lied.
Yet in that asbestos almost
prison, she delighted in sweets,
in baking what she wanted to eat.
She gobbled books whole,
she held sway over the neighbor
women reading their palms.
Gossip quieted her pain. Others
suffer too, she said. Amein.
V
That was Cobb Farm
Little diurnal tragedies
Mercy for the wren baby pushed
from the nest by the bigger hatchling—
egg the cowbird deposited.
Mercy for the green turtles caught
in the sudden cold of the bay
when the nor’easter blows.
Mercy for the pregnant cat thrown
out to starve, nursing her five kittens
among garbage and broken glass.
Mercy for the geese the golfers
want poisoned because they disturb
the green beside already polluted pools.
Mercy for the birds trying to fly
south on ancient routes, blinded
by our lights, dying on skyscrapers.
All around us are creatures we barely
notice, trying to preserve their only
lives among our machinery,
among our smog and smoke, inside
our radiation, among the houses and
roads built on their once habitats.
The next evolutionary step
In the Herring River, the mummichog
lives along with eels, alewives, green
and bullfrogs, snapping turtles
and muskrats. Of all these
the mummichog is the smallest
but the hardiest. It can withstand
heat and cold. Polluted waters
do not sicken it. It survives most
poisons and is predicted to outlive
us all in nuclear disaster.
It schools with hundreds of kin
who move as one through muddy
waters, feeling their way. On
the full moon it releases its eggs
and on the new moon too making
sure there will always be multitudes
of mummichogs. I, who am far
less sure of my survival, salute
you, for in spite of all we do to
destroy, you’ll repopulate earth.
That was Cobb Farm
When I drive around my village
poking through half the buildings
are what they used to be: the upscale
gallery I never enter was the post office.
On busy mornings in summer what
car acrobatics were required to pick
up the mail, the parking ample
enough in the winter, now jammed.
The gas station that’s turned into pizza;
the restaurant that failed five
different owners and now stands
vacant, its most recent sign fading
to GNR ATO, a warning perhaps
to future entrepreneurs. The fire
station now sells leather clothing
from May to October. Houses
from which friends were rushed
to the hospital to die or brought
back home to do it in peace.
The field where the white horse
Ajax browsed. Once in a thunder
storm, he climbed onto my porch
and stuck his head in the window.
Stood there awhile and then walked
slowly down the drive and away.
The candle factory became the library.
The farm was cut into development lots.
A hurricane brought down a forest
like skinny dominoes, now a field.
The wrecked boat’s bones no longer
protrude at low tide. Millionaires’
summer houses fell over the cliff.
Used to be, used to—my head crammed
with useless memories: an attic in
a house someone buys, wondering
why the owner kept all that old junk.
They meet
Lava from an island volcano
plunges into the sea. Vermilion
and black landscape by day,
at night the white torrents
resemble television reports
of rush hour traffic.
Where water and fire
collide, a column of smoke
and steam gushes u
pward,
water boiling as the lava
did. Nothing living could
survive this fusion.
How it roars as it meets
the water. This is a tropical
sea, not cold but lava
is boiling rock, magma
melting all it touches
till water snuffs it.
Now it turns back to rock.
Excitement. Smoking.
Irresistible fire consuming
all in its path. Till abruptly
it’s doused and returns
to a previous state.
So it goes sometimes
with lovers.
A cigarette left smoldering
Walking through the luminous rain
sliding down her bare arms as if
the city wept, she dreamed instead
of fire, drops of it small as beetles.
I could walk through fire, she
thought, but she was wrong. Her
summer dress went up in a single
torch and she screamed
like something torn. I see her face
still, sometimes when I think I am
falling asleep and then don’t,
her mouth a perfect circle.
We die different ways. We beg
to go painlessly as rain falling.
Discovery motion
The kitten from the shelter hasn’t
learned her name Xena yet. But how
wonderful that leap: those nonmeows
humans utter mean something.
When I mention her name, Puck
turns his head and looks at her.
He has grasped that noises belong
to beings and objects and actions:
out, chicken, no, come, sit. How
does a creature without language
suddenly put that attachment to-
gether? Human babies preprogrammed
to stare at faces, still take a while.
They babble long before they speak.
Then there’s the long learning process
that words are not the thing,
that promises only shape air, that
cries of passion are nonnegotiable,
that we walk through our days
followed by biting swarms of lies.
Sun in January
An icy wind down from Quebec
freezes the homeless teenager
sleeping in a carton under
the rumble of a highway bridge.
Walking in High Toss, I find
the corpse of a dog some
hunter shot. By accident?
In anger? For sport? To
the dog, why would that
matter, the paws outstretched
as if to beg, head chin down
between them, flies swarming.
A friend is back in chemo.
All food tastes like metal,
she says. I have no appetite.
It’s the third time of poison.
Today the whole world shines
as if someone polished every
single twig. The air is vanilla
ice cream. We are warm together.
So much can go wrong
we are almost afraid to be happy.
Little rabbit’s dream song
I will be safe in the grass.
I will be as safe as I was
when my mother cuddled me
in the high grass.
I will have plenty to eat.
I will have not only the wild
grasses and tender fruit
but carrots and cabbage.
No dog will see me, no
coywolf, no prowling cat.
No hawk will spy me
from a dot in the sky.
I will be safe and full.
I will be warm as when
my mother cuddled me
content in the high grass.
Let it be so, let it be
so, let it be so all
the sun and into the dark
when the coywolves howl.
Different voices, one sentence
I love you in one voice is an arrival,
in another a curse. It can be a wall
imprisoning. Or a door opening
to who knows what pain or joy.
When it’s spoken sometimes
the listener flinches, wants to
force it back into the mouth
that dropped it like a net.
Sometimes it has been waited
for so long it has lost its juice
wizened now, a winter potato
in the bottom of the sack.
Sometimes we fall into it
willing to take what we can get.
Cotton’s wife
She knows she is right at breakfast,
the correct cereal with fatless milk.
Afterward she runs herself gaunt.
I weigh less at forty than at fourteen,
she confides to just about everyone.
In the mirror an aura of sanctity.
Her husband will not love her
if she is not perfect, flat, hard
as a landing strip. His disapproval
frosts their bed and her blood.
He is the voice of the Puritan
father. He channels Cotton Mather
and dreams of burning native villages
full of naked sinners, of hanging
uppity women who mutter charms.
She reads the fine print on every
bottle, in every manual. Her
mattresses still sport their tags.
Life is a marathon that keeps
getting longer. Her nipples bleed.
The Puritan’s wife becomes a pillar
of rock, an obelisk pointing toward
the cold grey sky—a monument
commemorating a girl who tried
to grow into a woman but was pruned.
That summer day
The morning of the day you died
the birds were singing backup
to a huge red sun
marching out of the green marsh.
Later as your breath was rasping
that sun now fiery white
beat on the blue gong of the sky
and the birds were silent.
The squash blossoms were opening
to warmth. A bumblebee zizzed
its way through the garden. A striped
caterpillar mounted the dill.
A robin ate it in two gulps. Later
a ruddy fox looked at me from
under the pitch pines, eyeing
the tabby in the window.
Everybody went about their daily
round, chasing and being chased,
flying, trotting, eating, eaten while
you were slowly swallowed
and we wept.
Insomniac prayer at 2 a.m.
Sleep winds around me like a coy
snake, touching, squeezing, feinting
withdrawing. Tedious foreplay
never arriving at the act itself.
Or the absence of act: that place
I can let go of the day and allow
problems to fall like a tray of dishes
breaking, except that in the morning
every problem is seamlessly intact.
I’m a tightrope walker who longs
to let go, to dive into that sweet fog
below. Rise up, fog, and engulf me,
melt me into you. Let me cease
all the brain and body’s muttering,
the discontents of organ and joint.
Let me be Nobody—no body, no
mind nattering, no ambitions,
losses, bills, projects, obligations:
let nothing fill me like a deserted hall
where words no longer resonate.
I want to be emptied out, a purse
dumped on the
table. Sleep, you
are the only room I long to enter
that moon of white silence.
The body in the hot tub
The day was planned, birthday
of two friends, Indian food.
They had secured the ingredients
mail order two weeks before.
The day was preordered, time
to make the mango chutney, time
to wash the rice, to pound spices
in the mortar, soak chickpeas.
The police pounded on the door
at six a.m., sent the couple
and their dog into exile from
a crime scene: a nude woman
facedown in their tenant’s
hot tub. No, they had heard
nothing. The dog had not barked,
he slept with them. A quiet night.
