by Marge Piercy
like clothes back from the cleaners.
The map of your veins has been studied,
your thighs have been read and reported,
a leaden mistrust of the rhetoric of tenderness
thickens your tongue.
At the worst you see old movies in my eyes.
How can I persuade you that every day we choose
to give birth, to murder or feed our friends, to die a little.
2.
You are an opening in me.
Smoke thick as pitch blows in,
a wind bearing ribbons of sweet rain,
and the sun as field of dandelions, as rusty razor blade.
Scent colors the air with tear gas, with lemon lilies.
Most of the time you are not here.
Mostly I do not touch you.
Mostly I am talking to someone else.
I crawl into you, a bee furry with greed
into the deep trumpeting throat of a crimson lily
speckled like a newly hatched robin.
I roll, heavy with nectar.
Later, I will turn this afternoon into honey
and live on it, frugally.
It will sweeten my tea.
3.
In the pit of the night our bodies merge,
dark clouds passing through each other in lightning,
the joining of rivers far underground in the stone.
I feel thick but hollow, a polyp floating on currents.
My nerves have opened wide mouths
to drink you in and sing O O on the dark
till I cannot fix boundaries where you start and I stop.
Then you are most vulnerable.
In me that nakedness does not close by day.
My quick, wound, door, my opening,
my lidless eye.
Don’t you think it takes trust,
your strength, your temper always
in the room with us like a doberman leashed.
Touch is the primal sense—
for in the womb we swam lapped and tingling.
Fainting, practicing death, we lose
sight first, then hearing, the mouth and nose deaden
but still till the end we can touch.
I fear manipulation by that handle.
Trust flourishes like a potato plant, mostly underground:
wan flowers, dusty leaves chewed by beetles,
but under the mulch as we dig
at every node of the matted tangle
the tubers, egg-shaped and golden with translucent skin,
tumble from the dirt to feed us
homely and nourishing.
4.
The Digger Indians were too primitive,
pushed onto the sparse alkaline plateau,
to make pottery that could stand on the fire.
They used to make soup by heating an oval stone
and dropping it in the pot cracking hot.
When traders came and sold them iron kettles
the women found cooking easier
but said the soup never tasted so good again.
Soup stone
blunt, heavy in my hands,
you soak, you hold, you radiate warmth,
you can serve as a weapon,
you can be used again and again
and you give a flavor to things I could miss.
5.
Beds that are mirrors,
beds that are rotisseries where I am the barbecue,
beds that are athletic fields for the Olympic trials,
beds that are dartboards, beds that are dentist’s chairs,
beds that are consolation prizes floating on chicken soup,
beds where lobotomies are haphazardly performed, beds
that ride glittering through lies like a ferris wheel,
all the beds where a woman and a man
try to steal each other’s bones
and call it love.
Yet that small commitment floating on a sea of spilled blood
has meaning if we inflict it.
Otherwise we fail into dry accommodation.
If we do not build a new loving out of our rubble
we will fall into a bamboo-staked trap on a lush trail.
You will secrete love out of old semen and gum and dreams.
What we do not remake
plays nostalgic songs on the jukebox of our guts,
and leads us into the old comfortable temptation.
6.
You lay in bed depressed, passive as butter.
I brought you a rose I had grown. You said
the rose was me, dark red and perfumed and three-quarters open,
soft as sometimes with embarrassment you praise my skin.
You talked of fucking the rose. Then you grew awkward;
we would never be free of roles, dominance and submission,
we slam through the maze of that pinball machine forever.
I say the rose is a place where we make love.
I am a body beautiful only when fitted with yours.
Otherwise, it walks, it lifts packages, it spades.
It is functional or sick, tired or sturdy. It serves.
Together we are the rose, full, red as the inside
of the womb and head of the penis,
blossoming as we encircle, we make that symmetrical fragrant emblem,
then separate into discrete workday selves.
The morning mail is true. Tomorrow’s picketline is true.
And the rose, the rose of our loving
crimson and sonorous as a cellist
bowing on the curve of our spines, is true.
7.
We will be equal, we say, new man and new woman.
But what man am I equal to before the law of court or custom?
The state owns my womb and hangs a man’s name on me
like the tags hung on dogs, my name is, property of.
The language betrays us and rots in the mouth
with its aftertaste of monastic sewers on the palate.
Even the pronouns tear my tongue with their metal plates.
You could strangle me: my hands
can’t even encircle your neck.
Because I open my mouth wide and stand up roaring
I am the outlawed enemy of men.
A party means what a bullfight does to the bull.
The street is a gauntlet.
I open my mail with tongs.
All the images of strength in you, fathers and prophets and heroes,
pull against me, till what feels right to you
wrongs me, and there is no rest from struggle.
We are equal if we make ourselves so, every day, every night
constantly renewing what the street destroys.
We are equal only if you open too on your heavy hinges
and let your love come freely, freely, where it will never be safe,
where you can never possess.
8.
When we mesh badly, with scraping and squeaking,
remember that every son had a mother
whose beloved son he was,
and every woman had a mother
whose beloved son she wasn’t.
What feels natural and easy is soft murder
of each other and that mutant future
striving to break into bloom
bloody and red as the real rose.
Periodic, earthy, of a violent tenderness
it is the nature of this joining
to remain partial and episodic
yet feel total: a mountain that opens like a door
and then closes
like a mountain.
The spring offensive of the snail
Living someplace else is wrong
in Jerusalem the golden
floating over New England smog,
above paper company forests,
deserted brick textile mills
square brooders
on the rotten rivers,
developer-chewed mountains.
Living out of time is wrong.
The future drained us thin as paper.
We were tools scraping.
After the revolution
we would be good, love one another
and bake fruitcakes.
In the meantime eat your ulcer.
Living upside down is wrong,
roots in the air
mouths filled with sand.
Only what might be sang.
I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
The journey is too long
to run, cursing those
who can’t keep up.
Give me your hand.
Talk quietly to everyone you meet.
It is going on.
We are moving again
with our houses on our backs.
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.
Pack the Kapital and the vitamin E,
the basil plant for the sill,
Apache tears you
picked up in the desert.
But remember to bury
all old quarrels
behind the garage for compost.
Forgive who insulted you.
Forgive yourself for being wrong.
You will do it again
for nothing living
resembles a straight line,
certainly not this journey
to and fro, zigzagging
you there and me here
making our own road onward
as the snail does.
Yes, for some time we might contemplate
not the tiger, not the eagle or grizzly
but the snail who always remembers
that wherever you find yourself eating
is home, the center
where you must make your love,
and wherever you wake up
is here, the right place to be
where we start again.
Councils
(for two voices, female and male)
We must sit down
and reason together.
We must sit down.
Men standing want to hold forth.
They rain down upon faces lifted.
We must sit down on the floor
on the earth
on stones and mats and blankets.
There must be no front to the speaking
no platform, no rostrum,
no stage or table.
We will not crane
to see who is speaking.
Perhaps we should sit in the dark.
In the dark we could utter our feelings.
In the dark we could propose
and describe and suggest.
In the dark we could not see who speaks
and only the words
would say what they say.
Thus saying what we feel and what we want,
what we fear for ourselves and each other
into the dark, perhaps we could begin
to begin to listen.
Perhaps we should talk in groups
small enough for everyone to speak.
Perhaps we should start by speaking softly.
The women must learn to dare to speak.
The men must bother to listen.
The women must learn to say, I think this is so.
The men must learn to stop dancing solos on the ceiling.
After each speaks, she or he
will repeat a ritual phrase:
It is not I who speaks but the wind.
Wind blows through me.
Long after me, is the wind.
Laying down the tower
Each of the following poems issues from a card in the Tarot deck. The Tarot cards have existed in some form since the Renaissance, and always they have carried a heretical meaning in their rich freight of the common symbols of Western culture, Western literature. I first ran across them many, many years ago when I was passionately involved in Yeats, his poetry, his ideas, the people whose work touched his own, including the creators of the deck I use still, Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite.
In the late sixties I began to handle the cards again. Whether using them in a mixture of divination and covert advice-giving to friends or meditating on individual cards, I found they stirred my imagination and often provided imagery that would enter my work. For me they are rich and disturbing and provoke many levels of responding, feeling and knowing.
These eleven poems are the cards of a Tarot reading. As in any reading, the context of the total set influences the way individual cards are interpreted. Every reading of the cards implies judgments—a valuing of some attributes and activities and a condemning of others. Every reading has underlying it a clumping of ideas about self and others, about good and bad, about female and male, about what winning and losing mean.
This reading is political; the values are different from the more conventional ways of reading the deck. But they’re not any more present than in the ways that say the Nine of Cups is a fortunate card because it means you get a lot of “goods” to have and hold.
We must break through the old roles to encounter our own meanings in the symbols we experience in dreams, in songs, in vision, in meditation. Some of these symbols are much older than capitalism, and some contain knowledge we must recover; but we receive all through a filter that has aligned the stuff of our dreams, our visions, our poetry by values not our own.
What we use we must remake. Then only we are not playing with dead dreams but seeing ourselves more clearly, and more clearly becoming. The defeated in history lose their names, their goddesses, their language, their culture. The myths we imagine we are living (old westerns, true romances) shape our choices.
Some of the most significant myths are those of history. Here I am reconciling myself to my own history and trying to bring my sense of that history to you. I experience current media and official formulas about the recent past as an assault, a robbery. At the same time, in my third movement I go through a sense of ghostly recurrence, of centrifugal forces and schisms that unnecessarily rack and divide. Each succeeding movement has been for me a qualitative change in depth of personal involvement, in perception of the world, in what I want; the totality of the struggle in the women’s movement has shaken me and altered me past the level of conscious mind. But trying to write our own history is of common concern, for if we cannot learn from that recent past and each other, we become our worst rhetoric. Whatever is not an energy source is an energy sink.
1973
THE SIGNIFICATOR,
THE QUERENT:
The queen of pentacles
This is my deck I unwrap, and this is the card for me.
I will in any house find quickly like my sister the cat
the most comfortable chair, snug out of drafts.
Empathy flows through my fingers: I need to touch.
I am at home in that landscape of unkempt garden,
mulch and manure, thorny blackberry and sunflower and grape coiling,
tomato plants mad with fecundity bending their stakes,
asparagus waving fronds in the wind.
Even in a New York apartment with dirt
bought in bags like chocolate candy, I raised herbs.
I prefer species roses rough as weeds
with a strong scent, simple flowers and hips good for jam.
I like wine’s fine weather on my palate.
I can sink into my body like a mole
and be lost in the tunnels of the nerves, suckling.
I want to push roots deep in my hillside and sag with ripeness,
an apple tree sprawling with fruit.
The music sacred to me speaks through drums
directly on my pulses, into the chambers of my brain.
Yet this knowing is hard and bloody, that should dance through us.
Too many have
been murdered from the sky,
the soil has been tainted and blows away and the water stinks.
I want to grow into the benign mother with open hands
healing and fertile but must spay myself to serve,
sear off one breast like an Amazon to fight
for even the apple that shines in the hand
is secretly waxed and full of poison.
The orange is dyed with the blood of the picker.
The peach plucked green tastes of paper dollars,
run off by the emperor to finance his wars.
How often my own words set my teeth on edge
sour and hard, tearing the roof of my mouth.
What I do well and what I must do make war in my chest.
Through other women sometimes I can touch
pruned selves, smothered wishes, small wet cries that vanished
and think how all together we make up one good strong woman.
Still to get strength
for the things we have to do that frighten me
I go and dig my hands into the ground.
THE MATTER:
The tower struck by lightning reversed; the overturning of the tower
All my life I have been a prisoner under the Tower.
Some say that grey lid is the sky. Our streets are hammers.
Grey is the water we drink, grey the face I cannot love in the mirror,
grey is the money we lack, the itch and scratch of skins rubbing.
Grey is the color of work without purpose or end,
and the cancer of hopelessness creeping through the gut.
In my bones are calcium rings of the body’s hunger
from grey bread that turns to ash in the belly.
In my brain schooled lies rot into self-hatred: and who
can I hate in the cattle car subway
like the neighbor whose elbow cracks my ribs?
The Tower of Baffle speaks bureaucratic and psychologese,
multiple choice, one in vain, one insane, one trite as rain.
Military bumblewords, pre-emptive stroke, mind and body count and strategic omelet.
