by Marge Piercy
What did you fear in me, the child who wore
your hair, the woman who let that black hair
grow long as a banner of darkness, when you
a proper flapper wore yours cropped.
You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery
flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough.
Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat.
Secretly bones formed in the bread.
I became willful, private as a cat.
You never knew what alleys I had wandered.
You called me bad and I posed like a gutter
queen in a dress sewn of knives.
All I feared was being stuck in a box
with a lid. A good woman appeared to me
indistinguishable from a dead one
except that she worked all the time.
Your payday never came. Your dreams ran
with bright colors like Mexican cottons
that bled onto the drab sheets of the day
and would not bleach with scrubbing.
My dear, what you said was one thing
but what you sang was another, sweetly
subversive and dark as blackberries
and I became the daughter of your dream.
This body is your body, ashes now
and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts,
my throat, my thighs. You run in me
a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood,
you sing in my mind like wine. What you
did not dare in your life you dare in mine.
How grey, how wet, how cold
They are bits of fog caught in armor.
The outside pretends to the solidity of rocks
and requires force and skill bearing in
to cut the muscle, shatter the illusion.
If you stare at them, your stomach
curls, the grey eyes of Athena
pried out, the texture of heavy phlegm,
chill clots of mortality and come.
They lie on the tongue, distillations
of the sea. Fresh as the morning
wind that tatters the mist.
Sweet as cream but with that bottom
of granite, the taste of deep well
water drawn up on the hottest day,
the vein of slate in true Chablis,
the kiss of acid sharpening the tongue.
They slip down quick as minnows
darting to cover, and the mouth
remembers sex. Both provide
a meeting of the primitive
and worldly, in that we do
little more for oysters than the gull
smashing the shells on the rocks
or the crab wrestling them open,
yet in subtle flavor and the choice
to taste them raw comes a delicacy
not of the brain but of the senses
and the wit to leave perfection bare.
Taking a hot bath
Surely nobody has ever decided
to go on a diet while in a tub.
The body is beautiful stretched
out under water wavering.
It suggests a long island of pleasure
whole seascapes of calm sensual
response, the nerves as gentle fronds
of waterweed swaying in warm currents.
Then if ever we must love ourselves
in the amniotic fluid floating
a ship at anchor in a perfect
protected blood-warm tropical bay.
The water enters us and the minor
pains depart, supplanted guests,
the aches, the strains, the chills.
Muscles open like hungry clams.
Born again from my bath like a hot
sweet tempered, sweet smelling baby,
I am ready to seize sleep like a milky breast
or start climbing my day hand over hand.
Sleeping with cats
I am at once source
and sink of heat; giver
and taker. I am a vast
soft mountain of slow breathing.
The smells I exude soothe them:
the lingering odor of sex,
of soap, even of perfume,
its afteraroma sunk into skin
mingling with sweat and the traces
of food and drink.
They are curled into flowers
of fur, they are coiled
hot seashells of flesh
in my armpit, around my head
a dark sighing halo.
They are plastered to my side,
a poultice fixing sore muscles
better than a heating pad.
They snuggle up to my sex
purring. They embrace my feet.
Some cats I place like a pillow.
In the morning they rest where
I arranged them, still sleeping.
Some cats start at my head
and end between my legs
like a textbook lover. Some
slip out to prowl the living room
patrolling, restive, then
leap back to fight about
hegemony over my knees.
Every one of them cares
passionately where they sleep
and with whom.
Sleeping together is a euphemism
for people but tantamount
to marriage for cats.
Mammals together we snuggle
and snore through the cold nights
while the stars swing round
the pole and the great horned
owl hunts for flesh like ours.
The place where everything changed
Great love is an abrupt switching
in a life bearing along at express speeds
expecting to reach the designated stations
at the minute listed in the timetable.
Great love can cause derailment,
coaches upended, people screaming,
luggage strewn over the mountainside,
blood and paper on the grass.
It’s months before the repairs are done,
everyone discharged from the hospital,
all the lawsuits settled, damage
paid for, the scandal subsided.
Then we get on with the journey
in some new direction, hiking overland
with camels, mules, via helicopter
by barge through canals.
The maps are all redrawn and what
was north is east of south
and there be dragons in those mountains
and the sun shines warmer and hairier
and the moon has a cat’s face.
There is more sunshine. More rain.
The seasons are marked and intense.
We seldom catch colds.
There is always you at my back
ready to fight when I must fight;
there is always you at my side
the words flashing light and shadow.
What was grey ripples scarlet and golden;
what was bland reeks of ginger and brandy;
what was empty roars like a packed stadium;
what slept gallops for miles.
Even our bones are reformed in the close
night when we hold each other’s dreams.
Memories uncoil backward and are remade.
Now the first egg itself is freshly twinned.
We build daily houses brick by brick.
We put each other up at night like tents.
This story tells itself as it grows.
Each morning we give birth to one another.
The chuppah
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The home has its four corners.
The chuppah stands on four poles.
The marriage stands on four legs.
Four points loose the winds
that blow on the walls of the house,
/>
the south wind that brings the warm rain,
the east wind that brings the cold rain,
the north wind that brings the cold sun
and the snow, the long west wind
bringing weather off the far plains.
Here we live open to the seasons.
Here the winds caress and cuff us
contrary and fierce as bears.
Here the winds are caught and snarling
in the pines, a cat in a net clawing
breaking twigs to fight loose.
Here the winds brush your face
soft in the morning as feathers
that float down from a dove’s breast.
Here the moon sails up out of the ocean
dripping like a just washed apple.
Here the sun wakes us like a baby.
Therefore the chuppah has no sides.
It is not a box.
It is not a coffin.
It is not a dead end.
Therefore the chuppah has no walls.
We have made a home together
open to the weather of our time
We are mills that turn in the winds of struggle
converting fierce energy into bread.
The canopy is the cloth of our table
where we share fruit and vegetables
of our labor, where our care for the earth
comes back and we take its body in ours.
The canopy is the cover of our bed
where our bodies open their portals wide,
where we eat and drink the blood
of our love, where the skin shines red
as a swallowed sunrise and we burn
in one furnace of joy molten as steel
and the dream is flesh and flower.
O my love O my love we dance
under the chuppah standing over us
like an animal on its four legs,
like a table on which we set our love
as a feast, like a tent
under which we work
not safe but no longer solitary
in the searing heat of our time.
House built of breath
Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.
Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.
Wet as onions, dry as salt.
Slow as honey, fast as seltzer,
my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love
my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple
I love you daily as milk,
I love you nightly as aromatic port.
The words trail a bitter slime like slugs,
then in the belly warm like cabbage borscht.
The words are hung out on the line,
sheets for the wind to bleach.
The words are simmering slowly
on the back burner like a good stew.
Words are the kindling in the woodstove.
Even the quilt at night is stuffed with word down.
When we are alone the walls sing
and even the cats talk but only in Yiddish.
When we are alone we make love in deeds.
And then in words. And then in food.
Nailing up the mezuzah
A friend from Greece
brought a tin house
on a plaque, designed
to protect our abode,
as in Greek churches
embossed legs or hearts
on display entreat aid.
I hung it but now
nail my own proper charm.
I refuse no offers of help,
at least from friends,
yet this presence
is long overdue. Mostly
we nurture our own
blessings or spoil them,
build firmly or undermine
our walls. Who are termites
but our obsessions gnawing?
Still the winds blow hard
from the cave of the sea
carrying off what they will.
Our smaller luck abides
like a worm snug in an apple
who does not comprehend
the shivering of the leaves
as the ax bites hard
in the smooth trunk.
We need all help proffered
by benign forces. Outside
we commit our beans to the earth,
the tomato plants started
in February to the care
of the rain. My little
pregnant grey cat offers
the taut bow of her belly
to the sun’s hot tongue.
Saturday I watched alewives
swarm in their thousands
waiting in queues quivering
pointed against the white
rush of the torrents
to try their leaps upstream.
The gulls bald as coffin
nails stabbed them casually
conversing in shrieks, picnicking.
On its earth, this house
is oriented. We grow
from our bed rooted firmly
as an old willow into the water
of our dreams flowing deep
in the hillside. This hill
is my temple, my soul.
Malach hamoves, angel of death
pass over, pass on.
The faithless
Sleep, you jade smooth liar,
you promised to come
to me, come to me
waiting here like a cut
open melon ripe as summer.
Sleep, you black velvet
tomcat, where are you prowling?
I set a trap of sheets
clean and fresh as daisies,
pillows like cloudy sighs.
Sleep, you soft-bellied
angel with feathered thighs,
you tease my cheek with the brush
of your wings. I reach
for you but clutch air.
Sleep, you fur-bottomed tramp,
when I want you, you’re in
everybody’s bed but my own.
Take you for granted and you stalk
me from the low point of every hour.
Sleep, omnivorous billy goat,
you gobble the kittens, the crows,
the cop on duty, the fast horse,
but me you leave on the plate
like a cold shore dinner.
Is this divorce permanent?
Runneled with hope I lie down
nightly longing to pass
again under the fresh blessing
of your weight and broad wings.
And whose creature am I?
At times characters from my novels swarm through me,
children of my mind, and possess me as dybbuks.
My own shabby memories they have plucked and eaten
till sometimes I cannot remember my own sorrows.
In all that I value there is a core of mystery,
in the seed that wriggles its new roots into the soil
and whose pale head bursts the surface,
in the dance where our bodies merge and reassemble,
in the starving baby whose huge glazing eyes
burned into my bones, in the look that passes
between predator and prey before the death blow.
I know of what rags and bones and clippings
from frothing newsprint and poisonous glue
my structures are built. Yet these creatures
I have improvised like golem walk off and thrive.
Between one and two thirds of our lives we spend
in darkness, and the little lights we turn on
make little holes in that great thick rich void.
We are never done with knowing or with gnawing,
but under the saying is whispering, touching
and silence. Out of a given set of atoms
we cast and recast the holy patterns new.
Magic mama
/> The woman who shines with a dull comfortable glow.
The woman who sweats honey, an aphid
enrolled to sweeten the lives of others.
The woman who puts down her work like knitting
the moment you speak, but somehow it gets done
secretly in the night while everyone sleeps.
The woman whose lap is wide as the Nile
delta, whose voice is a lullaby
whose flesh is stuffed with goosedown.
Whose eyes are soft-focus mirrors.
Whose arms are bolsters. Whose love
is laid on like the municipal water.
She is not the mother goddess, vortex
of dark and light powers with her consorts,
her hungers, her favorites, her temper
blasting the corn so it withers in its ear,
her bloody humor that sends the hunter fleeing
to be tracked and torn by his hounds,
the great door into the earth’s darkness
where bones are rewoven into wheat,
who loves the hawk as she loves the rabbit.
Big mama has no power, not even over herself.
The taxpayer of guilt, whatever she gives
you both agree is never enough.
She is a one-way street down which pour
parades of opulent gifts and admiration
from a three-shift factory of love.
Magic mama has to make it right, straighten
the crooked, ease pain, raise the darkness,
feed the hungry and matchmake for the lonesome
and ask nothing in return. If you win
you no longer know her, and if you lose
it is because her goodness failed you.
Whenever you create big mama from another