by Marge Piercy
who go making uncouth noises and bangs in the street.
He is a good man: if you don’t believe me,
ask any god.
He says they all think like him.
Barbie doll
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Hello up there
Are you You or Me or It?
I go littering you over the furniture
and picking you out of the stew.
Often I’ve wished you otherwise: sleek,
docile, decorative and inert.
Yet even in daydreams I cannot imagine myself
otherwise thatched: coarse, black and abundant
like weeds burst from the slagheaps of abandoned mines.
In the ’50’s children used to point and shout Witch.
Later they learned to say Beatnik and later yet, Hippie,
but old grandmamas with Thessaloniki or Kiev in their throats
thought I must be nice because I looked like a peasant.
In college my mother tried to change my life
by bribing me to cut it off and have it “done.”
Afterwards the hairdresser chased me waving my hair in a paper bag.
The next man who happened was a doctor’s son
who quoted the Lord Freud in bed and on the pot,
thought I wrote poems because I lacked a penis
and beat me when he felt ugly.
I grew my hair back just as quick as I could.
Cloud of animal vibrations,
tangle of hides and dark places
you keep off the tidy and the overly clean and the wango upright.
You proclaim the sharp limits of my patience
with trying to look like somebody’s wet dream.
Though I can trim you and throw you out with the coffee grounds,
when I am dead and beginning to smell worse than my shoes
presumably you will continue out of my skull
as if there were inside no brains at all
but only a huge bobbin of black wire unwinding.
High frequency
They say that trees scream
under the bulldozer’s blade.
That when you give it water,
the potted coleus sings.
Vibrations quiver about leaves
our ears are too gross
to comprehend.
Yet I hear on this street
where sprinklers twirl
on exterior carpeting
a high rising whine.
The grass looks well fed.
It must come from inside
where a woman on downs is making
a creative environment
for her child.
The spring earth cracks
over sprouting seeds.
Hear that subliminal roar,
a wind through grass and skirts,
the sound of hair crackling,
the slither of anger
just surfacing.
Pressed against glass and yellowing,
scrawny, arching up to
the insufficient light, plants
that do not belong in houses
sing of what they want:
like a woman who’s been told
she can’t carry a tune,
like a woman afraid people will laugh
if she raises her voice,
like a woman whose veins surface
compressing a scream,
like a woman whose mouth hardens
to hold locked in her own
harsh and beautiful song.
The woman in the ordinary
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.
Unlearning to not speak
Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
sift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.
Now it is time for finals:
losers will be shot.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.
They tell her she is womb-man,
babymachine, mirror image, toy,
earth mother and penis-poor,
a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream
rapidly melting.
She grunts to a halt.
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.
Women’s laughter
1.
When did I first become aware—
hearing myself on the radio?
listening to tapes of women in groups?—
of that diffident laugh that punctuates,
that giggle that apologizes,
that bows fixing parentheses before, after.
That little laugh sticking
in the throat like a chicken bone.
That perfunctory dry laugh
carries no mirth, no joy
but makes a low curtsy, a kowtow
imploring with praying hands:
forgive me, for I do not
take myself seriously.
Do not squash me.
2.
My friend, on the deck we sit
telling horror stories
from the Marvel Comics of our lives.
We exchange agonies, battles and after each
we laugh madly and embrace.
That raucous female laughter
is drummed from the belly.
It rackets about kitchens,
flapping crows
up from a carcass.
Hot in the mouth as horseradish,
and the brain.
3.
Years ago I had a friend
who used to laugh with me
braying defiance, as we roar
with bared teeth.
After the locked ward
where they dimmed her with drugs
and exploded her synapses,
she has now that cough
fluttering in her throat
like a crippled pigeon
as she says, but of course
I was sick, you know,
and laughs blood.
Burying blues for Janis
Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone
of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy
that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases
until I could, partially, break free.
How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?
Your voice would grate right on the marrow-filled bone
that cooks up that rich stew of masochism where we swim,
that woman is born to suffer, mistreated and cheated.
We are trained to that hothouse of ripe pain.
Never do we feel so alive, so in character
as when we’re walking the floor with the all-night blues.
When some man not being there who’s better gone
becomes a lack that swells up to a gaseous balloon
and flattens from us all thinking and sensing and purpose.
Oh, the downtrodden juicy longdrawn female blues:
you throbbed up there with your face slightly swollen
and your barbed hair flying energized and poured it out,
the blast of a furnace of which the whole life is the fuel.
You embodied that good done-in mama who gives and gives
like a fountain of boozy chicken soup to a rat race of men.
You embodied the pain hugged to the breasts like a baby.
You embodied the beautiful blowzy gum of passivity,
woman on her back to the world endlessly hopelessly raggedly
offering a brave front to be fucked.
That willingness to hang on the meathook and call it love,
that need for loving like a screaming hollow in the soul,
that’s the drug that hangs us and drags us down
deadly as the icy sleet of skag that froze your blood.
The best defense is offensive
The turkey vulture,
a shy bird ungainly on the ground
but massively graceful in flight,
responds to attack
uniquely.
Men have contempt for this scavenger
because he eats without killing.
When an enemy attacks,
the turkey vulture vomits:
the shock and disgust of the predator
are usually sufficient
to effect his escape.
He loses only his dinner,
easily replaced.
All day I have been thinking
how to adapt
this method of resistance.
Sometimes only the stark
will to disgust
prevents our being consumed:
there are clearly times
when we must make a stink
to survive.
Icon
In the chapel where I could praise
that is just being built,
the light bleeding through one window blazons
a profiled centaur whose colors mellow the sun.
See her there: hoofs braced into the loam,
banner tail streaming, burnished thighs,
back with the sheen of china but sturdy as brick,
that back nobody rides on.
Instead of a saddle, the poised arms,
the wide apart breasts, the alert head
are thrust up from the horse’s supple torso
like a swimmer who breaks water to look
but doesn’t clamber out or drown.
She is not monstrous
but whole in her power, galloping:
both the body tacking to the seasons of her needs
and the tiger lily head aloft with tenacious gaze.
This torso is not ridden.
This face is no rider.
As a cascade is the quickening of a river,
here thought shoots in a fountain to the head
and then slides back through
those rippling flanks again.
Some collisions bring luck
I had grown invisible as a city sparrow.
My breasts had turned into watches.
Even my dreams were of function and meeting.
Maybe it was the October sun.
The streets simmered like laboratory beakers.
You took my hand, a pumpkin afternoon
with bright rind carved in a knowing grin.
We ran upstairs.
You touched me and I flew open.
Orange and indigo feathers broke through my skin.
I rolled in your coarse rag-doll hair.
I sucked you like a ripe apricot down to the pit.
Sitting crosslegged on the bed we chattered
basting our lives together with ragged stitches.
Of course it all came apart
but my arms glow with the fizz of that cider sun.
My dreams are of mating leopards and bronze waves.
We coalesced in the false chemistry of words
rather than truly touching
yet I burn cool glinting in the sun
and my energy sings like a teakettle all day long.
We become new
How it feels to be touching
you: an Io moth, orange
and yellow as pollen,
wings through the night
miles to mate,
could crumble in the hand.
Yet our meaning together
is hardy as an onion
and layered.
Goes into the blood like garlic.
Sour as rose hips,
gritty as whole grain,
fragrant as thyme honey.
When I am turning slowly
in the woven hammocks of our talk,
when I am chocolate melting into you,
I taste everything new
in your mouth.
You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you? Now
though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.
Meetings like hungry beaks
There is only time to say the first word,
there is only time to stammer the second.
Traffic jams the highways of nerve,
lungs fill with the plaster of demolition.
Each hour has sixty red and gold and black hands
welding and plucking and burning.
Your hair crosses my mouth in smoke.
The bridge of arms,
the arch of backs:
our fingers clutch.
The violet sky lights and crackles
and fades out.
I am at a desk adding columns of figures.
I am in a supermarket eyeing meat.
The scene repeats on the back of my lids
like an advertisement in neon
for another world.
To be of use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mu
d and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
Bridging
Being together is knowing
even if what we know
is that we cannot really be together
caught in the teeth of the machinery
of the wrong moments of our lives.
A clear umbilicus
goes out invisibly between,
thread we spin fluid and finer than hair
but strong enough to hang a bridge on.
That bridge will be there
a blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull
whenever you need
whenever you can open your eyes and want
to walk upon it.
Nobody can live on a bridge
or plant potatoes
but it is fine for comings and goings,
meetings, partings and long views
and a real connection to someplace else
where you may
in the crazy weathers of struggle
now and again want to be.
Doing it differently
1.
Trying to enter each other,
trying to interpenetrate and let go.
Trying not to lie down in the same old rutted bed
part rack, part cocoon.
We are bagged in habit
