by Marge Piercy
Our will dies with us indeed, although
consequences resonate through the stars
with old television dramas,
undergoing a red shift we will never
comprehend as distance bends our acts,
our words, our memories, to alien
configurations fading into lives
of creatures strange to us as jellyfish
in a future we have hewn, bled,
bounded and escaped from. What
we have truly bequeathed is what
we have done or neglected, to that end.
Still life
We have glass eyes and rubber fingers.
Our minds are industrial dumps,
full of chemical residues, reruns,
jeans commercials and the asses
of people we have never touched.
The camera sees for us.
Our pets act out our emotions.
Quiet has to be waited into.
Can I learn to coil, a snake
on a warm flat rock? Can I stand
eyes and ears open
hands up like a daisy?
Can I learn to see what the fox
contemplates, paws tucked and smiling?
My bones have forgotten
how to fall through the moment
to float leaf-light and land
like a sheet of paper.
Will a teacher come
if I wait in the orange light
on top of this dune?
See the sparrow hawk stand in the air
balancing the keel of her breastbone
on the surges of wind and warmth:
till she strikes hard,
how the pressures sustain her
exact and teetering
on blurred wings.
From HoJo’s to Mr. Softee
When vittles must keep on a shelf for years
like newsprint slowly yellowing, when food
can’t be bitter or spicy or hot or sour,
then people drink sweet pop, gobble sweet cupcakes
under icings and pour sugar on presweetened
breakfast crunchies and eat iceberg lettuce
with thick orange corn-syrup dressing, sugar
in the hamburgers and fish sticks.
Swelling in our soft mounded flesh, instead
of ornery people, we want our food to love us.
The child learns: Love is sugar.
She grows up sucking, chewing, nibbling
and is still and always hungry in her cancerous
cells busy and angry as swarming ants.
The longings of women
The longings of women:
butterflies beating against
ceilings painted blue like sky;
flies buzzing and thumping their heads
against the pane to get out.
They die and are swept off
in a feather duster.
The hopes of women are pinned
after cyanide by rows
labeled in Latin
the fragile wings fading.
The keeper speaks with melancholy
of how beautiful they were
as if he had not killed them.
The anger of women runs like small
brown ants you step on,
swarming in cracks in the pavement,
marching in long queues
through the foundation and inside,
nameless, for our names
are not yet our own.
But we are many and hungry
and our teeth though small are sharp.
If we move together
there is no wall we cannot erode
dust-grain by speck, and the lion
when he lies down is prey
to the army of ants.
Out of sight
Put away.
They do that to pets:
He was suffering. We
had him put away.
They do that to women: She wouldn’t
do the dishes, she heard Saint
Catherine telling her to prophesy in the street.
He had her put away.
Refuse: the garbage, that
which is refused, which is denied,
which is discarded.
The crime of the women in the locked ward
was asking for help.
If you beg from the wrong people
they chop off your hands,
the old woman said to me.
My companion made a sign
with her fingers, but I did
not think the old lady
mistaken. Her hands rattled
like dead leaves from Thorazine.
She said, I can’t hold a pen
but it can hold me.
The powerful make and break laws.
The weak flee to the bus
station, their purses stuffed
with tissues and old letters.
The weak rush into the closet
where the dresses smell like Mother,
into the mirror and through the wall
into the maze of dreams.
You are punished for wrong thinking
by having your brain burnt out
as the Koran bids you cut off
the hand of a thief.
The bodies of the witches were burned
alive in the millions. What
barbarity. We burn only brains.
Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?
1.
My old cat lives under a chair.
Her long fur conceals the sharp
jut of her fleshless bones.
Her eyes are dimmed by clouds
of cataract, only visible
if you remember their willow green
as I could judge my mother’s
by calling up that fierce charred
brown gaze, smiting, searching.
When one of the young cats approaches
she growls in anger harmless
as distant thunder. They steal her food.
They do not act from malice.
They would curl up with her and wash.
She hisses fear. Her lifelong
companion died. They appeared.
Surely the young bear the blame
for all the changes that menace
in the fog of grey shapes looming.
Her senses that like new snow
had registered the brush strokes
of tracks, the fall of a pine needle,
the alighting of a chickadee;
her senses that had opened
greedy as the uncurling petals
of a sea anemone that drinks
the world’s news from the current;
that tantalized her with message
of vole and shrew and rabbit,
boasting homage her lovers sprayed,
have failed her like an old
hanging bridge that decays
letting her drop through in terror
to the cold swift river beneath.
In her ears is her blood rushing.
The light is trickling away.
2.
One day this week my father
briefly emerged from the burrow
he bought himself lined with nurses.
When he gets me on the phone
he never believes it’s me.
When I insist, he swells with anger.
He really wants to phone my mother.
Often he calls me by her name
but every time I fail him.
I am the dead woman in body,
hips and breasts and thighs,
elbows and chin and earlobes,
black black hair as at the age
she bore me, when he still
loved her, here she stands,
but when I open my mouth
it’s the wrong year and the world
bristles with women who make short
&
nbsp; hard statements like men and don’t
apologize enough, who don’t cry
when he yells or makes a fist.
He tells me I have stolen his stamps
down in Florida, the bad utopia
where he must share a television.
You took my nail scissors, he shouts
but means I stole his vigor
deposited in his checkbook like a giant’s
external soul. I have his checkbook
and sign, power of attorney,
as I pay his doctors, doctors,
doctors, as I hunch with calculator
trying to balance accounts. We each
feel enslaved to the other’s will.
3.
Father, I don’t want your little pot
of nuggets secreted by bad living
hidden in the mattress of Merrill Lynch
in an account you haven’t touched
for twenty years, stocks that soared,
plummeted, doddering along now
in their own mad dinosaur race.
That stock is the doctor that Mother
couldn’t call when she had the first
stroke, the dress she didn’t get,
at eighty-six still scrubbing, cooking,
toting heavy laundry. The dentist
I couldn’t go to so I chewed
aspirin as my teeth broke
at fifteen when I went out to work,
all the pleasures, the easing of pain
you could have bought with both
your endless hard mutual labor.
The ghostly dust bowl roared in the mind
afterward, the desert of want
where you would surely perish and starve
if you did not hide away pennies of power,
make do, make do, hold hard,
build a fortress of petrified dollars
stuck together like papier-mâché
so the tempest of want
could be shut out to howl at others.
Dirty little shacks, a rooming-
house Mother ran for decades,
a trailer park; after she died
you bought into Total Life Care,
a tower of middle-class comfort
where you could sit down to lunch
declaring, My broker says.
But nobody would listen. Only
Mother had to listen and she is dead.
You hid alone in your room fighting
with the cleaning woman who came
each week but didn’t do it right,
then finally one midnight wandered out naked
finally to the world among rustling
palms demanding someone make you lunch.
4.
I wouldn’t sign papers to commit
you but they found a doctor who would.
Now you mutter around the ward,
This was supposed to be fun.
Do you see your future in the bent
ones who whimper into their laps,
who glare at walls through which
the faces of the absent peer, who hear
conspiracy mutter in the plumbing?
I am the bad daughter who could speak
with my mother’s voice if I wanted,
because I wear her face, who ought
to be cooking your meals, who ought
to be running the vacuum you bought
her, but instead I pretend
I am married, pretend to be writing
books and giving speeches.
You won’t forgive her ever for dying
but I heard you call the night nurse
by her name. You speak of the fog
you see in the room. Greyness
is blowing in, the fog that took
my mother while you slept,
the fog that shriveled your muscles,
the fog that thickens between you
and strangers here where all
is provided and nothing is wanted.
The sun blasts on, flat and blatant.
Everything was built yesterday
but you. Nobody here remembers
the strike when you walked the picket line
joking with sleet freezing your hair,
how you stood against the flaming wall
of steel and found the cracked bearing,
how you alone could make the old turbines
turn over, how you had the wife
other men watched when she swayed
over the grass at the company picnic,
how you could drink them all witless.
You’re a shadow swallowed by fog.
Through your eyes it enters your brain.
When it lifts you see only pastel
walls and then your anger standing there
gleaming like a four-hundred-horsepower car
you have lost your license to drive.
UNDERRATED PLEASURES
Building is taming
Once a hillside above a marsh,
a swell of sand and clay sprouting
pines, white oaks, blueberry bushes.
A friend who came along to view
the lot pissed into the bushes.
A red-shouldered hawk rose
from a rabbit carcass furious
sputtering and wet.
Yet when the builders finished
the land was undone,
the house a box gouged into sand,
the hillside stripped
washing down into the road below.
I planted and terraced to hold
the land. Then this became
my only graphic artwork,
painting with greys and greens,
the four-dimensional sculpture
of the garden, every two weeks recoloring,
the angular, the globular,
the tousled, the spiky, the lush.
Collage of fragrances, sweet,
spicy, acrid, subtle, banging.
Once I watched my female Burmese
Colette pass along the herb
garden savoring, rubbing her cheek
into the funky leaves, but at the anise
hyssop she sniffed at it and hissed,
as if its odor spoke to her rudely.
Cats would have a thousand names for scent.
Dogwood, honeysuckle, autumn olive
bore berries and summoned birds
to stir the air of the hillside,
to scuttle in the underbrush kicking
up leaves, to flit through branches.
Every person who has lived here
has carved initials on the land:
that path, that fence, those steps, that shed.
What draws the eye and hand initially,
what charms, is after we move in
changed by us.
The lover alters
the beloved by her love,
even by that hot and tender regard.
What we make is part the other
and part us, and what we become
in our new love is someone
born from both.
Cowering in a corner
A spider nests in the frying pan
this Wednesday morning; a jumping
spider stalks prey on the window
ledge among bottles; little black
spider is suddenly swimming
in my wineglass; hairy king
kong spider swings from the rafters
to the oil painting; spider
crouches in my sneaker; spider
bobbles on the end of an escape
filament acrobatic over my typewriter
in front of my nose.
What do they eat? Not the mice
in the walls. Not the ants
busy on their rush-hour freeways
from the sugar cannister
and the olive oil spill to the secret
tunnel world under the sink.
Not the sowbugs, wee armadillos
nibbling the geranium leaves.
Not the wasps sleeping in paper
lanterns under the eaves. The other
nine hundred thousand inhabitants of what
I foolishly call my house.
The Listmaker
I am a compiler of lists: 1 bag
fine cracked corn, 1 sunflower seeds.
Thin tomato seedlings in hotbed;
check dahlias for sprouting.
Write Kathy. Call Lou. Pay
oil bill. Decide about Montana.
I find withered lists in pockets
of raincoats, reminders to buy birthday
presents for lovers who wear those warm
sweaters now in other lives. And what
did I decide about Montana? To believe
or disbelieve in its existence?
To rise at five some morning and fly there?
A buried assent or denial rots beneath.
I confess too that sometimes when I am listing
what I must do on a Monday, I will put on
tasks already completed for the neat pleasure
of striking them out, checking them off.
What do these lists mean? That I mistrust my memory,
that my attention, a huge hungry crow
settling to carrion even on the highway
hates to rise and flap off, wants to continue
feasting on what it has let down upon
folding the tent of its broad dusty wings.
That I like to conquer chaos one square
at a time like a board game.
That I fear the sins of omission more
than commission. That the whining saw
of the mill of time shrieks always in my ears
as I am borne with all the other logs
forward to be dismantled and rebuilt
into chairs, into frogs, into running water.
All lists start where they halt, in intention.
Only the love that is work completes them.
Going into town in the storm
The sky is white and the earth is white