Circles on the Water

by Marge Piercy

  Above in the sun live those who own, making our weather with their refuse.

  Their neon signs instruct us through the permanent smog.

  Rockefellers, Mellons and Du Ponts, you Fords and Houghtons,

  who are you to own my eyes? Who gave me to be your serf?

  I have never seen your faces but your walls surround me.

  With the loot of the world you built these stinking cities as monuments.

  The Tower is ugly as General Motors, as public housing,

  as the twin piles of the World Trade Center,

  tallest, biggest and menacing as fins on an automobile,

  horns on a Minotaur programmed to kill.

  The weight of the Tower is in me. Can I ever straighten?

  You trained me in passivity to lay for you like a doped hen.

  You bounce your gabble off the sky to pierce our brains.

  Your loudspeakers from every television and classroom

  and your transistors grafted onto my nerves at birth

  shout you are impregnable and righteous forever.

  But any structure can be overthrown.

  London Bridge with the woman built into the base

  as sacrifice is coming down.

  The Tower will fall if we pull together.

  Then the Tower reversed, symbol of tyranny and oppression,

  shall not be set upright.

  We are not turning things over merely

  but we will lay the Tower on its side.

  We will make it a communal longhouse.

  THAT WHICH OPPOSES THE OVERTHROWING OF THE TOWER:

  The nine of cups

  Not fat, not gross, just well fed and hefty he sits before what’s his,

  the owner, the ultimate consumer, the overlord.

  No human kidneys can pump nine cups of wine through

  but that’s missing the point of having: possession is power

  whether he owns apartment houses or herds of prime beef

  or women’s soft hands or the phone lines or the right to kill

  or pieces of paper that channel men’s working hours.

  He is not malcontent. He has that huge high-colored

  healthy face you see on executives just massaged.

  He eats lobster, he drinks aged scotch, he buys pretty women.

  He buys men who write about how he is a servant of circumstance.

  He buys armies to shoot peasants squatting on his oil.

  He is your landlord: he shuts off the heat and the light and the water,

  he shuts off air, he shuts off growth, he shuts off your sex.

  He buys men who know geology for him, he buys men who count stars,

  he buys women who paint their best dreams all over his ceiling.

  He buys giants who grow for him and dwarfs who shrink

  and he eats them all, he eats, he eats well,

  he eats and twenty Bolivians starve, a division of labor.

  You are in his cup, you float like an icecube, you sink like an onion.

  Guilt is the training of his servants that we may serve harder.

  His priests sell us penance for his guilt,

  his psychiatrists whip our parents through our cold bowels,

  his explainers drone of human nature and the human condition.

  He is squatting on our heads laughing. He belches with health.

  He feels so very good he rewards us with TV sets

  which depict each one of us his servants sitting

  just as fat and proud and ready to stomp

  in front of the pile of tin cans we call our castle.

  On the six o’clock news the Enemy attacks.

  Then our landlord spares no expense to defend us,

  for the hungry out there want to steal our TV sets.

  He raises our taxes one hundred per cent

  and sells us weapons and sends us out to fight.

  We fight and we die, for god, country and the dollar

  and then we come back home

  and he raises the rent.

  THE INFLUENCE PASSING:

  The knight of swords

  I was a weapon. I brandished myself, I was used in the air.

  We rushed in waves at the Tower and were hurtled back.

  Because we were right, should we not win?

  When you know that in the foreign and domestic colonies

  people are dying of hunger, of napalm, of gas, of rats, of racism,

  dying and dying each death is a drop of blood falling

  all night on your forehead, each death is a nail tapped in.

  It is participation in murder

  to sit one moment longer at the key punch.

  It is guilt by association to raise your hand in class.

  It is being an accomplice to take a job in the lab.

  Buying a car, you pay for a fragmentation bomb.

  If you are not fighting, are you not supporting?

  If you saw the children starving in Brazil, would you wait

  the five minutes that is five more bodies bloating?

  If you saw the children burning in the bombed villages of Laos

  would you have another coffee and eat the jelly doughnut?

  If you saw the inside of that prison, would you switch channels?

  So run at the barricade and throw back the canister of gas.

  So take the club in your face and keep on slugging.

  We must win, we must win for everybody so we cannot,

  we can never pause, we have no time to look, we cannot breathe.

  Run, keep running, don’t look sideways.

  The blood is raining down all the time, how can we rest?

  How can we pause to think, how can we argue with you,

  how can we pause to reason and win you over?

  Conscience is the sword we wield,

  conscience is the sword that runs us through.

  THAT WHICH IS NOW BEHIND, PREVIOUS CONDITION:

  The eight of swords

  Bound, blinded, stymied, with bared blades for walls

  and alone, my eyes and mouth filled up with dark.

  We had grown used to a Movement, that sense of thaw,

  things breaking loose and openings and doors pushed by the wind,

  spring after the end of the Age of Ice.

  Used to feeling connected, used to sisters and brothers,

  used to an us that felt bigger and warmer than them.

  We grew like weeds in sand.

  We lusted after brave loud crashing rhetoric

  and threw small gains away because they made no show.

  We clashed on each other, we chopped, we never hit harder

  than when we were axing a comrade two feet to the right.

  Factions charred our energies. Repression ground us.

  Some they bought off, some they shot down,

  some they locked in their prisons or their asylums,

  some they wasted with their heroin pumped in the streets,

  some they have broken in hospitals, some they have gagged,

  some they tormented till we rushed into death screaming rage,

  some they tricked into despair so we stood impaled:

  no longer could we imagine winning.

  Despair is the worst betrayal, the coldest seduction:

  to believe at last that the enemy will prevail.

  Hush, the heart’s drum, my life, my breath.

  There is finally a bone in the heart that does not break

  when we remember we are still part of each other,

  the muscle of hope that goes on in the dark

  pumping the blood that feeds us.

  THE INFLUENCE COMING INTO PLAY:

  The seven of pentacles

  Under a sky the color of pea soup

  she is looking at her work growing away there

  actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

  as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

  If you te
nd them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

  if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

  if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

  if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

  then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

  Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

  You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

  More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

  Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

  Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

  Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

  Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

  Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

  Live a life you can endure: make love that is loving.

  Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

  a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

  interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

  Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

  reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

  This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,

  for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting,

  after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

  THE AIM, THE BEST THAT CAN BE HOPED FOR:

  The magician

  Fusion is miracle and there is no other way, it is necessary.

  Every new age is unbelievable beforehand and after, inevitable.

  History is a game played backwards only.

  I fling my eyes into the maw of the sun.

  With all our strength, we thrust into fierce light.

  We are yearning like frogs bulging our throats in the spring marsh

  and croaking harsh and ridiculous spasms of hope.

  I tell you, roses want to bloom out of the wood,

  the goodness in people wants to break free

  of the blind ego.

  Birth is a miracle in every germinating seed.

  We had thought we were waiting our Messiah, our Lenin,

  our golden Organizer who would fuse us into one body

  but now we see when we grow heads they lop them off.

  We must be every one the connection between energy and mass,

  every one the lightning that strikes to topple the tower.

  Each must conduct light, heat and crackling strength

  into each other: we must open a thousand fiery eyes and mouths

  of flame that make us visible and pass to others.

  The lion arches in my back, the goat kicks in my legs.

  You skim, a glinting dragonfly, into my head and we couple in air.

  Each time we say sisters,

  each time you say brothers, we are making magic

  for we were born each to scream alone, a worm in armor,

  trained to grab at all and cherish nothing.

  Every soul must become a magician; the magician is in touch.

  The magician connects. The magician helps each thing

  to open into what it truly wants to utter.

  The saying is not the magic: we have drunk words and eaten

  manifestoes and grown bloated on resolutions

  and farted winds of sour words that left us weak.

  It is in the acting with the strength we cannot

  really have till we have won.

  Give birth to me, sisters, in struggle we transform

  ourselves, but how often, how often

  we need help to cut loose, to cry out, to breathe!

  In the skull, floating on drugs, everybody is born again good

  but how hard to make that miracle pass in the streets.

  This morning we must make each other strong.

  Change is qualitative: we are

  each other’s miracle.

  QUERENT’S ATTITUDE AS IT BEARS UPON THE MATTER:

  The three of cups

  A poem is a dancing: it goes out of a mouth to your ears

  and for some moments aligns us,

  so we wheel and turn together.

  The blackbirds dance over the marsh as they drive off the hawk.

  The marsh hawks hunt in spirals paired, crying.

  The bees dance where the pollen is to be gathered, and dance their fierce mating.

  When I dance I forget myself, I am danced.

  Music fills me to overflowing and the power moves

  up from my feet to my fingers, making leaves as sap does.

  My dance is of you: we are dancing together though scattered,

  atomistic as Brownian motes, the same music holds us.

  Even after Altamont, even after we have discovered

  we are still death’s darling children, born of the print-out,

  the laser, the war-game, the fragmentation weapons of education,

  still we must bear joy back into the world.

  We must rise up in joy and endurance,

  we must shake off the oil of passivity and no more be spectators

  even before the masque of our own dark and bright dreams.

  We grew up in Disneyland with ads for friends

  and believed we could be made new by taking a pill.

  We wanted instant revolution, where all we had to add

  was a little smoke.

  There is no tribe who dance and then sit down

  and wait for the crops to harvest themselves

  and supper to roll over before the pot.

  We shall survive only if we win; they will kill us

  if they can, and killing is what they do best.

  We have learned to do nothing well.

  We are still strangers to our bodies,

  tools fit awkwardly in our hands, our weapons explode,

  we speak to each other haltingly in words they gave us.

  Taste what is in your mouth,

  if it is water, still taste it.

  Wash out the cups of your fingers,

  clean your eyes with new tears for your sister.

  We are not worse revolutionaries if we remember

  that the universe itself pulses like a heart;

  that the blood dances within us; that joy is a power

  treading with hoofs and talons on our flimsy bodies;

  that water flows and fire leaps and the land gives strength

  if you build on it with respect, if you dance on it with vigor,

  if you put seeds in with care and give back what is left over;

  that a ritual of unity makes some of what it pretends;

  that every thing is a part of something else.

  THE HOUSE, THE ENVIRONMENT:

  The emperor

  In the house of power grown old but unyielding

  the emperor sits severe in mail, watching all that creep;

  even over the grasshoppers and the minnows, over the leaves

  that catch sun into food, he wields barrenness.

  He holds a globe like something he might bite into

  and an ankh, for he will carry his dominion into the living cells

  and the ancient cabala of the genes he plans to revise

  till everything born is programmed to obey.

  The Man from Mars with sterile mountains at his back—

  perhaps strip-mined, perhaps the site of weapons testing—

  if we opened that armor like a can, would we find a robot?

  quaking old flesh? the ghost of an inflated bond issue?

  Evil old men banal as door knobs

  who rule the world like a comic strip,

  you are the Father Who Eats His Young.

  Power abhors a vacuum, you say and sit down at the Wurlitzer

  to play the color organ of poison gases.

  All roads lead to the top of the pyramid o
n the dollar bill

  where hearts are torn out and skulls split to feed

  the ultimate ejaculating machine, the ruling class climax by missile.

  The gnats of intelligence who have bugged every pay toilet

  in the country sing in your beard of court cases and jails to come.

  It is reason enough to bomb a village if it cannot be bought.

  Heavy as dinosaurs, plated and armored,

  you crush the land under your feet and flatten it.

  Lakes of smoking asphalt spread where your feet have trod.

  You exiled the Female into blacks and women and colonies.

  You became the armed brain and the barbed penis and the club.

  You invented agribusiness, leaching the soil to dust,

  and pissed mercury in the rivers and shat slag on the plains,

  withered your emotions to ulcers,

  strait-jacketed the mysteries and sent them to shock therapy.

  Your empress is a new-model car with breasts.

  There is in the dance of all things together no profit

  for each feeds the next and all pass through each other,

  the serpent whose tail is in her mouth,

  our mother earth turning.

  Now the wheel of the seasons sticks and the circle is broken

  and life spills out in an oil slick to rot the seas.

  You are the God of the Puritans playing war games on computers:

  you can give birth to nothing

  except death.

  WHAT IS MOST HOPED AND/OR MOST FEARED:

  The judgment

  I call on the dead, I call on the defeated, on the starved,

  the sold, the tortured, the executed, the robbed:

  Indian women bayoneted before their children at Sand Creek,

  miners who choked on the black lung,