Circles on the Water

by Marge Piercy

  strikers shot down at Pullman and Republic Steel,

  women bled to death of abortions men made illegal,

  sold, penned in asylums, lobotomized, raped and torn open,

  every black killed by police, national guard, mobs and armies.

  Live in us: give us your strength, give us your counsel,

  give us your rage and your will to come at last into the light.

  I fear the trial, I fear the struggle, it parches and withers me.

  I fear the violence into whose teeth we march.

  I long for the outcome with every cheated cell.

  We shall all waken finally to being human.

  I was trained to be numb, I was born to be numbered and pegged,

  I was bred and conditioned to passivity, like a milk cow.

  Waking is the sharpest pain I have ever known.

  Every barrier that goes down takes part of my flesh

  leaving me bloody. How can I live wide open?

  Why must I think of you and you before I take a bite?

  Why must I look to my sister before I scratch my itch?

  I used to shuffle and giggle. I kept my eyes down

  tucking my shoulders in so I would not rub the walls

  of the rut, the place, the role.

  Now anger blisters me.

  My pride rumbles, sputtering lava.

  Every day is dangerous and glad.

  “Why do you choose to be noisy, to fight, to make trouble?”

  you ask me, not understanding I have been born raw and new.

  I can be killed with ease, I can be cut right down,

  but I cannot crawl back in the cavern

  where I lay with my neck bowed.

  I have grown. I am not by myself.

  I am too many.

  OUTCOME OF THE MATTER:

  The sun

  Androgynous child whose hair curls into flowers,

  naked you ride a horse without saddle or bridle

  easy between your thighs from the walled garden outward.

  Coarse sunflowers of desire whose seeds birds crack open

  nod upon your journey, child of the morning whose sun

  can only be born from us who strain bleeding to give birth.

  Grow into your horse, let there be

  no more riders or ridden.

  Child, where are you heading with arms spread wide

  as a shore, have I been there, have I seen that land shining

  like sun spangles on clean water rippling?

  I do not know your dances, I cannot translate your tongue

  to words I use, your pleasures are strange to me

  as the rites of bees: yet you are the yellow flower

  of a melon vine growing out of my belly

  though it climbs up where I cannot see in the strong light.

  My eyes cannot decipher those shapes of children or burning clouds

  who are not what we are: they go barefoot like savages,

  they have computers as household pets; they are seven sexes

  and only one sex; they do not own or lease or control.

  They are of one body and of tribes. They are private as shamans

  learning each her own magic at the teats of stones and trees.

  They are all technicians and peasants.

  They do not forget their birthright of self

  or their mane of animal pride

  dancing in and out through the gates of the body standing wide.

  A bear lumbering, I waddle into the fields of their work games.

  We are stunted slaves mumbling over the tales

  of dragons our masters tell us, but we will be free.

  Our children will be free of us uncomprehending

  as we of those shufflers in caves who scraped for fire

  and banded together at last to hunt the saber-toothed tiger,

  the giant cave bear, predators

  that had penned them up cowering so long.

  The sun is rising, feel it: the air smells fresh.

  I cannot look in the sun’s face, its brightness blinds me,

  but from my own shadow becoming distinct

  I know that now at last

  it is beginning to grow light.

  BREAKING CAMP

  HARD LOVING

  4-TELLING

  TO BE OF USE

  From LIVING IN THE OPEN

  Living in the open

  1.

  People ask questions

  but never too many.

  They are listening for the button to push

  to make it go away.

  They wait for me to confess

  nights hollowed out with jealousy.

  Or people say, Isn’t that interesting

  and believe nothing.

  I must be public

  as a dish of hors d’oeuvres on a bar.

  I must hunt the shrubbery of couches for prey.

  Loving not packaged in couples

  shivers cracks down the closed world, the nuclear

  egg of childhood, radioactive stone

  at the base of the brain.

  Can you imagine not having to lie?

  To try to tell what you feel and want

  till sometimes you can even see

  each other clear and strange

  as a photograph of your hand.

  2.

  We are all hustling and dealing

  as we broil on the iron grates of the city.

  Our minds charred, we collide and veer off.

  Hard and spiny, we taste of DDT.

  We trade each other in.

  Talk is a poker game,

  bed is a marketplace,

  love is a soggy trap.

  Property breeds theft and possession,

  betrayal, the vinegar of contempt.

  This woman, does she measure up?

  This man, can I do better?

  Each love is a purchase that can be returned

  if it doesn’t fit.

  Hard as building a wall of sand.

  Hard as gathering blackberries naked

  in the thorny sprawl of a bramble.

  Hard as saying I’ve made a mistake

  and you were right.

  How hard to love.

  How painful to be friends.

  My life frays into refuse,

  parts of broken appliances,

  into tapes recorded over, photographs

  of people I no longer talk to

  even on the phone.

  How loud too the clash of my needs

  in my pockets as I run to you

  keys and coins jangling.

  My hungers yowl and scrap in the gutter.

  I will wring you for a few drops of reassurance.

  My fears are telling the beads of your spine.

  To hear your voice over the subway roar

  of my will requires discipline.

  No more lovers, no more husbands,

  no masters or mistresses, contracts, no affairs,

  only friends.

  No more trade-ins or betrayals,

  only the slow accretion of community,

  hand on hand.

  Help me to be clear and useful.

  Help me to help you.

  You are not my insurance, not my vacation,

  not my romance, not my job, not my garden.

  You wear your own flags and colors and your own names.

  I will never have you.

  I am a friend who loves you.

  I awoke with the room cold

  I awoke with the room cold and my cat

  Arofa kneading my belly.

  I had been walking around the lower east side

  while from every alley and fruit market and stoop,

  out from under the ravaged cars,

  the cats came running to me.

  All the cats had heard I was moving to the country

  because of my lungs

  and they began to cough and sneeze and
whine.

  All the starving rat-gnawed rickety spavined cats

  of the lower east side with their fleas and worms

  and their siren of hunger

  followed me through the teeming blocks.

  They threw themselves under the wheels of trucks

  in an effort to keep up.

  They were rubbing my ankles and yowling

  that I must take every one of them along.

  They wanted to breathe air that was not stained.

  They wanted to roll on wet grass.

  They wanted to chase a bird that wasn’t a dirty pigeon.

  Then the demands of the cats were drowned out.

  As I ran, all of the eleven and twelve and thirteen year olds

  who had died of skag in the smoking summer

  began to miaou and miaou and miaou

  till all of New York was white with pain like snow.

  Gracious goodness

  On the beach where we had been idly

  telling the shell coins

  cat’s paw, cross-barred Venus, china cockle,

  we both saw at once

  the sea bird fall to the sand

  and flap grotesquely.

  He had taken a great barbed hook

  out through the cheek and fixed

  in the big wing.

  He was pinned to himself to die,

  a royal tern with a black crest blown back

  as if he flew in his own private wind.

  He felt good in my hands, not fragile

  but muscular and glossy and strong,

  the beak that could have split my hand

  opening only to cry

  as we yanked on the barbs.

  We borrowed a clippers, cut and drew out the hook.

  Then the royal tern took off, wavering,

  lurched twice,

  then acrobat returned to his element, dipped,

  zoomed, and sailed out to dive for a fish.

  Virtue: what a sunrise in the belly.

  Why is there nothing

  I have ever done with anybody

  that seems to me so obviously right?

  Homesick

  Finally I have a house

  where I return.

  House half into the hillside,

  wood that will weather to the wind’s grey,

  house built on sand

  drawing water like a tree from its roots

  where my roots too are set

  and I return.

  Where the men rode crosscountry on their dirt bikes in October

  the hog cranberry will not grow back.

  This land is vulnerable like my own flesh.

  In New York the land seems cast out by a rolling mill

  except where ancient gneiss pokes through.

  Plains and mountain dwarf the human, seeming permanent,

  but Indians were chasing mammoth with Folsom points

  before glacial debris piled up Cape Cod where I return.

  The colonists found beech and oak trees high as steeples

  and chopped them down.

  When Thor eau hiked from Sandwich outward

  he crossed a desert

  for they had farmed the land until it blew away

  and slaughtered the whales and seals extinct.

  Here you must make the frail dirt where your food grows.

  Fertility is created of human castings and the sea’s.

  In the intertidal beach around each sand grain

  swims a minute world dense with life.

  Each oil slick wipes out galaxies.

  Here we all lie on the palm of the poisoned sea our mother

  where life began and is now ending

  and we return.

  Seedlings in the mail

  Like mail order brides

  they are lacking in glamor.

  Drooping and frail and wispy,

  they are orphaned waifs of some green catastrophe

  from which only they have been blown to safety

  swaddled in a few wraiths of sphagnum moss.

  Windbreaks, orchards, forests of the mind

  they huddle in the dirt

  smaller than our cats.

  The catalog said they would grow

  to stand one hundred feet tall.

  I could plant them in the bathroom.

  I could grow them in window pots,

  twelve trees to an egg carton.

  I could dig four into the pockets of my jeans.

  I could wear some in my hair

  or my armpits.

  Ah, for people like us, followed

  by forwarding addresses and dossiers and limping causes

  it takes a crazy despairing faith

  full of teeth as a jack o’lantern

  to plant pine and fir and beech

  for somebody else’s grandchildren,

  if there are any.

  The daily life of the worker bee

  We breed plants, order seeds from

  the opulent pornography of the catalogs,

  plant, weed, fertilize, water.

  But the flowers do not shine for us.

  Forty days of life, working like a housewife

  with six kids in diapers, at it like an oil rig pumping.

  With condescension we pass on: busy as a bee.

  Yet for them the green will of the plants

  has thrust out colors, odors, the shapely trumpets and cups.

  As the sun strikes the petals, the flower uncurls,

  the bees come glinting and singing.

  Now she crawls into the crimson rooms of the rose

  where perfume reddens the air to port wine.

  Marigolds sturdy in the grass barking like golden chow dogs

  cry their wares to her. Enter. Devour me!

  In her faceted eyes each image reverberates.

  Cumulus clouds of white phlox

  pile up for her in the heat of the sunburnt day.

  Down into the soft well of the summer lilies,

  cerise, citron, umber, rufous orange,

  anthers with their palate of pollen

  tremble as she enters.

  She rubs her quivering fur

  into each blue bell of the borage.

  In the chamber of the peony she is massaged with silk.

  Forty days she is drunk with nectar.

  Each blossom utters fragrance to entice her,

  offers up its soft flanks, its maddening colors,

  its sweet and pungent fluids.

  She never mates: her life is orgasm of all senses.

  She dies one morning exhausted in the lap of the rose.

  Like love letters turned up in an attic trunk

  her honey remains to sweeten us.

  Cod summer

  June is the floodtide of green,

  wet and lush and leafy, heavyladen.

  In full summer the grass bleaches

  to sand, hue of grasshoppers on the dunes.

  The marsh begins to bronze.

  Hot salty afternoons: the sun

  stuns. Drops on our heads like a stone.

  Among the pitch pines the sparse shade

  simmers with resin.

  Crickets shiver the air.

  The path is white sand shimmering

  leading down from the hill of scrub oak

  crusty with lichens, reindeer moss,

  ripe earth stars scattering their spores.

  Nothing commands the eye

  except the sea at the horizon.

  We must actively look: textures

  of ground cover, poverty grass, bearberry,

  lowbush blueberry, wood lily, Virginia rose.

  The dusty beach plums range on the gnarled branch

  from soft dull green through blush and purple

  like a tourist’s sunset in miniature.

  Sandy, dwarfed, particular

  this landscape yields nothing from a car.

  A salt marsh must be learned on foot, wad
ing,

  lumbering in the muck, hopping tussocks of salt meadow grass,

  hay arising sideways from last year’s fallen harvest.

  The marsh clicks and rustles

  with fiddler crabs scuttling to their holes.

  The blue-eyed grass has bloomed.

  Now we find fat joints of samphire

  turning orange, the intricate sea lavender.

  Under us the tide undulates

  percolating through the layers, slithering

  with its smell of life feeding and renewing

  like my own flesh after sex.

  We go in this landscape together learning it

  barefoot and studious with our guides in a knapsack

  catching Fowler’s toads and letting them go.

  A proposal for recycling wastes

  Victim not of an accident

  but of a life that was accidental

  she sprawls on the nursing

  home bed: has a photo

  of herself at seventeen with long

  brown hair, face paprikaed

  with freckles, like a granddaughter

  who may live

  in San Diego. In Decatur

  love picked her up

  by the scruff and after

  out of work wandering dumped

  her in Back of the Yards Chicago.

  A broken nose, the scar of love;

  stretch marks and a tooth lost

  each child, love like

  tuberculosis, it happens.

  And generation used

  her like a rutted highway

  the heavy trucks trundling

  their burdens all day and all

  night. Her body was a thing

  stuffed, swollen, convulsed

  empty, producing for the state

  and Jesus three soldiers and one

  sailor, two more breeding wombs

  and a (defunct) prostitute.

  The surviving corporal drives

  hack, one mother waits tables;

  the other typed, married into

  the suburbs and is den

  mother to cubscouts.