The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010

by Marge Piercy

My sinuses bled. Whatever innocent object

  I touched, doorknob or light switch,

  sparks leapt to my hand in shock.

  Any contact could give sudden sharp pain.

  2.

  All too long I have been carrying a weight

  balanced on my head: a large iron pot

  supposed to hold something. Only now

  when I have been forced to put it down,

  do I find it empty except for a gritty stain

  on the bottom. You have told me

  this exercise was good for my posture.

  Why then did my back always ache?

  3.

  All too often I have wakened at night

  with that weight crouched on my chest,

  an attack dog pinning me down. I would

  open my eyes and see its eyes glowing

  like the grates of twin coal furnaces

  in red and hot menacing regard.

  A low growl sang in its chest, vibrating

  into my chest and belly its warning.

  4.

  If it rained for three weeks in August,

  you knew I had caused it by weeping.

  If your paper was not accepted, I had

  corrupted the judges or led you astray

  into beaches, dinner parties and cleaning

  the house when you could have been working

  an eighteen-hour day. If a woman would not

  return the importunate pressure of your hand

  on her shoulder, it was because I was watching

  or because you believed she thought I

  was watching. My watching and my looking away

  equally displeased. Whatever I gave you

  was wrong. It did not cost enough;

  it cost too much. It was too fancy, for

  that week you were a revolutionary

  trekking on dry bread salted with sweat

  and rhetoric. It was too plain; that week

  you were the superb connoisseur whose palate

  could be struck like a tuning fork only

  by the perfect, to sing its true note.

  5.

  Wife was a box you kept pushing me down

  into like a trunk crammed to overflowing

  with off-season clothes, whose lid

  you must push on to shut. You sat

  on my head. You sat on my belly.

  I kept leaking out like laughing

  gas and you held your nose

  lest I infect you with outrageous joy.

  Gradually you lowered all the tents

  of our pleasures and stowed them away.

  We could not walk together in dunes or

  marsh. No talk or travel. You would only fuck

  in one position on alternate Thursdays

  if the moon was in the right ascendancy.

  Go and do with others all the things

  you told me we could not afford.

  Your anger was a climate I inhabited

  like a desert in dry frigid weather

  of high thin air and ivory sun,

  sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging

  clouds that blinded and choked me,

  where my flesh froze to black ice.

  Very late July

  July in the afternoon, the sky

  rings, a crystal goblet without a crack.

  One gull passes over mewing for company.

  A tiger swallowtail hovers near magenta

  phlox, while a confetti cloud

  of fritillaries covers the goldenglow.

  Half under the tent of my skirt, my cat

  blinks at the day, content watching,

  allowing the swallowtail to light

  within paw reach, purring too softly

  to be heard, only the vibration from his

  brown chest buzzing into my palm.

  Among the scarlet blossoms of the runner

  beans twining on their tripods

  the hummingbird darts like a jet fighter.

  Today in think tanks, the data analysts

  not on vacation are playing war games.

  A worker is packing plutonium by remote

  control into new warheads. An adviser

  is telling a president as they golf,

  we could win it. July without a crack

  as we live inside the great world egg.

  Mornings in various years

  1.

  To wake and see the day piled up

  before me like dirty dishes: I have

  lived years knitting a love that

  he would unravel, as if Penelope

  spent every night making a warm

  sweater that Odysseus would tear

  in his careless diurnal anger.

  2.

  Waking alone I would marshal my tasks

  like battalions of wild geese to bear me

  up on the wings of duty over

  the checkered fields of other lives.

  Breakfast was hardest. I would trip

  on ghostly shards of broken

  domestic routines that entangled

  my cold ankles as the cats yowled

  to be fed, and so did I.

  3.

  I wake with any two cats, victors

  of the nightly squabble of who

  sleeps where, and beside me, you,

  your morning sleepyhead big as a field

  pumpkin, sleep caught in your fuzzy

  hair like leaves. The sun pours in

  sweet as orange juice or the rain licks

  the windows with its tongue or the snow

  softly packs the house in cotton batting.

  This opal dawn glows from the center

  as we both open our eyes and reach out

  asking, are you there? You! You’re

  there, the unblemished day before us

  like a clean white ironstone platter

  waiting to be filled.

  Digging in

  This fall you will taste carrots

  you planted, you thinned, you mulched,

  you weeded and watered.

  You don’t know yet how sweet

  they will taste, how yours.

  This earth is yours as you love it.

  We drink the water of this hill

  and give our garbage to its soil.

  We haul thatch for it and seaweed.

  Out of it rise supper and roses

  for the bedroom and herbs

  for your next cold.

  Your flesh grows out of this hill

  like the maple trees. Its sweetness

  is baked by this sun. Your eyes

  have taken in sea and the light leaves

  of the locust and the dark bristles

  of the pine.

  When we work in the garden you say

  that now it feels sexual, the plants

  pushing through us, the shivering

  of the leaves. As we make love

  later the oaks bend over us,

  the hill listens.

  The cats come and sit on the foot

  of the bed to watch us.

  Afterward they purr.

  The tomatoes grow faster and the beans.

  You are learning to live in circles

  as well as straight lines.

  The working writer

  I admire you to tantrums they say,

  you’re so marvelously productive,

  those plump books in litters

  like piglets.

  Then the comments light on my face

  stinging like tiny wasps,

  busy-busy, rush-rush, such a steamy

  pressured life. Why don’t

  you take a week off

  when I visit? I spend July

  at the beach myself. August

  I go to Maine. Martinique

  in January. I keep in shape

  Thursdays at the exercise salon.

  Every morning I do yoga for two

  hours; it w
ould mellow you.

  Then I grind wheat berries

  for bread, weave macrame hammocks

  and whip up a fluffy mousseline dress.

  Oh, you buy your clothes.

  I just don’t know how you live

  with weeds in the living room,

  piles of papers so high the yellow

  snow on top is perennial. Books

  in the shower, books in bed,

  a freezer full of books.

  You need a cleaning lady or two.

  I saw a bat in the bedroom

  last night, potatoes flowering

  behind the toilet.

  My cats clean the house, I say.

  I have them almost trained.

  In winter we dig the potatoes.

  All year we eat the books.

  The back pockets of love

  Your toes:

  modest stalagmites

  sticking up in the ice caves

  of the winter bed.

  Your toes:

  succulent mushrooms,

  stumpy chimney pots

  rising in their row.

  Wee round faces

  anonymous as nuns,

  callused, worn as coolies

  aging in their traces.

  Small fry,

  wriggling moonbeam

  minnows escaped from the dark

  traps of your shoes.

  Pipsqueak puppets,

  piglets nosing,

  soft thimbles, dumpy

  sofa pillows of flesh.

  Love dwells in the major caves of the psyche,

  chewing on the long bones of the limbs of courage,

  the great haunches of resolution,

  sucking the marrow bones, caves lit

  by the lasting flames of the intellect,

  but love cherishes too the back pockets,

  the pencil ends of childhood fears,

  the nose picking and throbbing sweet tooth,

  the silly hardworking toes that curl

  now blamelessly as dwarf cats

  in the tousled nest of mutual morning bed.

  Snow, snow

  Like the sun on February ice dazzling;

  like the sun licking the snow back

  roughly so objects begin to poke through,

  logs and steps, withered clumps of herb;

  like the torch of the male cardinal

  borne across the clearing from pine

  to pine and then lighting among the bird

  seed and bread scattered; like the sharp

  shinned hawk gliding over the rabbit

  colored marsh grass, exulting

  in talon-hooked cries to his larger mate;

  like the little pale green seedlings sticking

  up their fragile heavy heads on white stalks

  into the wide yellow lap of the pregnant sun;

  like the sky of stained glass the eye seeks

  for respite from the glitter that makes the lips

  part; similar to all of these pleasures

  of the failing winter and the as yet unbroken

  blue egg of spring is our joy as we twist

  and twine about each other in the bed

  facing the window where the sun plays

  the tabla of the thin cold air

  and the snow sings soprano

  and the emerging earth drones bass.

  In which she begs (like everybody else) that love may last

  The lilac blooms now in May,

  our bed awash with its fragrance,

  while beside the drive, buds

  of peony and poppy swell

  toward cracking, slivers of color

  bulging like a flash of eye

  from someone pretending to sleep.

  Each in its garden slot, each

  in its season, crocus gives way

  to daffodil, through to fall

  monkshood and chrysanthemum.

  Only I am the wicked rose

  that wants to bloom all year.

  I am never replete with loving

  you. Satisfaction

  makes me greedy. I want

  to blossom out with my joy of you

  in March, in July, in October.

  I want to drop my red red

  petals on the hard black ice.

  Let us gather at the river

  I am the woman who sits by the river

  river of tears

  river of sewage

  river of rainbows.

  I sit by the river and count the corpses

  floating by from the war upstream.

  I sit by the river and watch the water

  dwindle and the banks poke out like sore gums.

  I watch the water change from green to shit brown.

  I sit by the river and fish for your soul.

  I want to lick it clean.

  I want to turn it into a butterfly

  that will weave drunkenly from orchid to rose.

  Oh, close your eyes tight and push hard

  and evolve, all together now. We can

  do it if we try. We can take our world

  back if we want. It’s an araucana

  egg, all blue and green

  swaddled in filmy clouds.

  Don’t let them cook and gobble it,

  azure and jungle green egg laid

  by the extinct phoenix of the universe.

  Send me your worn hacks of tired themes,

  your dying horses of liberation,

  your poor bony mules of freedom now.

  I am the woman sitting by the river.

  I mend old rebellions and patch them new.

  Now the river turns from shit brown to bubbling blood

  as an arm dressed in a uniform

  floats by like an idling log.

  Up too high to see, bombers big as bowling alleys

  streak over and the automated battlefield

  lights up like a Star Wars pinball machine.

  I am the old woman sitting by the river scolding corpses.

  I want to stare into the river and see the bottom

  glinting like clean hair.

  I want to outlive my usefulness

  and sing water songs, songs

  in praise of the green brown river

  flowing clean through the blue green world.

  Ashes, ashes, all fall down

  1.

  We walk on the earth and feed of it;

  we breathe in the air or we choke;

  we drink water or die, but you:

  you cannot enter us. No pain

  is like your touch.

  Once we lived wholly without you,

  plucking fruit, digging roots, shaking

  down nuts, scavenging like bears.

  Our cousin mammals ignore or flee

  your angry lion’s roar.

  Emblem of all we have seized upon

  in nature, energy made property,

  as what we use uses us; what

  we depend on enslaves us; what

  we live by kills us.

  We stretch out our hands to the fire

  place watching the colors shift

  until the mind gives up buried images

  like the secret blue in the log

  the flame unlocks.

  2.

  Burning, burning, that fall I galloped,

  the cries of torn children ringing

  in my skull. Even cats mating in my Brooklyn

  alley invoked images of thatched villages

  scorched by bombing.

  Burning, burning, I turned and roared

  simple, loud as a trumpet blown, sonorous,

  brassy, commanded and commanding. In that

  heat everything dried from the inside,

  baked to ashes.

  Passion simplifies like surgery.

  We burn, and what we burn are the books,

  the couch, the rug, the bed, the houseplants,

  the friends who can’t clear out />
  fast enough.

  Yet a passionless life: all the virtues

  gilded like saints in their niches

  and nothing to move them. The architecture

  of airports, laundromats. Cafeteria food

  for the tepid will.

  On one hand hopping along, a well-appointed

  portly toad licking up bugs, patrolling

  the garden. On the other, flying

  through the night like a skunked dog,

  howling and drooling.

  Burning, burning, we can’t live

  in the fire. Nor can we in ice.

  Long ago we wandered from our homeland

  tropics following game to these harsh

  but fertile shores.

  3.

  On solstices, our ancestors leapt

  through fire, to bring the sun around.

  Surely some were not nimble enough

  and a trailing scarf or skirt turned

  burning shroud.

  Without risk maybe the sun won’t return.

  Without risk gradually the temperature

  drops, slowly, slowly. One day you notice

  the roses have all died. The next year

  no corn ripens.

  Then even the wheat rots where it stands.

  Glaciers slide down the mountains

  choking the valleys. The birds are gone.

  On the north side of the heart, the snow

  never melts.

  When I stare into fire, I see figures

  dancing. People of our merry potlatch,

  ghosts, demons or simply the memory

  of times I have danced in ecstasy all night,

  my hair on fire.

  5.

  Even breathing is a little burning.

  The banked fire of the cells eats

  oxygen like the arsonist’s blaze.

  All the minute furnaces stoked inside

  warm our skin.

  Life is a burning, and what we burn

  is all the others we eat and drink.

  We burn the carrot, we burn the cow,