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

by Marge Piercy

turns no-man’s-land into someone’s turf,

  making a stray and starving cat a pet.

  Naming makes a whale who swims through the sea

  strewn with human waste and poison,

  the trash of boats and cities,

  the nets and shipping, known to us,

  pod and matrilineal descent, travels

  and fate. One community encompasses

  this fragile fawn-colored coil of sand

  and the vast and roiling Gulf Stream river

  and all finny, furred and feathered who dwell therein.

  If we cannot preserve the greatest of these

  then we will surely follow that shape of natural power

  into the silence after its murdered song,

  the sea lapping like heavy oil at beaches

  where plastic shards cast up on the stained sand.

  Sexual selection among birds

  The soft breasted dun bird on her nest

  incubating a clutch of sand colored eggs,

  her dreams are scarlet and cobalt.

  Her mate is gaudy, enameled like

  a Fabergé egg, jeweled and singing:

  the artifact of her aesthetic lust.

  Over the bower of bush where she waits

  he dances in the air, mine, mine:

  but she knows better.

  Of all the females, she, feathered

  dinosaur, is the choosiest, the most

  critical, demanding of her mate

  not only fidelity, passion, offspring

  but that he sing like Mozart

  and bloom like a perfect rose.

  Shad blow

  1.

  Deer tracks cloven dark in the pale sand.

  The grey squirrels shriek and chase each other

  crashing from branch to branch of the oaks.

  The shad bloom is late this year and perfect,

  trees that are one great composite flower,

  wild carrots, Queen Anne’s lace the size

  of giraffes riffled by the breeze

  miles of salt have scrubbed

  bone white. Orange and lemon orioles

  flit among knotted branches. The trunks

  of shad are grey, blotched with lichen,

  fog caught and woven into wood.

  2.

  I used to lie under the sour cherry in the narrow

  yard of the house where we moved the year

  I turned fifteen. White galaxies that would become

  wine by summer’s end, pies in the sky,

  flashed against the sulfurous clouds of Detroit—

  blossoms out of mahogany bark shining.

  Who will I be? The will to love

  ate holes in my mind. I was riddled

  like a sieve with sharp sour desires.

  I can taste that raw homemade wine,

  taste a sweet and sour intoxicating pain

  so empty, wanting played shrilly on me

  like the wind over the mouth of a bottle

  compelling a keening too high pitched

  for a human to notice, but the dog next

  door flung back his head and howled too

  and my cat came stepping through the unmown

  grass to circle three times, then marked

  the tree with his spray as I burned

  to mark the world with something of mine.

  Spring came on like cramps in a growing body.

  3.

  In spring I raise my head to sniff at scents.

  I want to be out by the river watching the ale

  wives straddling the current, humping upstream.

  I thrust my hands into the cool rich soil,

  the moss like fur between cracks of the bricks.

  I want to roll like a big dog and shake free.

  The salamander cool as jelly, darkly colored

  as cabernet sauvignon lies on my palm

  then leaps to freedom, snap, in the woodpile.

  Appetite licks at the air, the tiny leaves

  opening their clenched silken banners.

  At two in the afternoon the fox runs on the beach

  going to paw at the late alewives crossing

  the bar where the brook eases into the bay.

  A gull runs at him, then flaps off.

  Once I thought the seasons were mine,

  moods, passions, itches I could scratch,

  voids I could fill with other’s bodies.

  Now I know I am in the seasons, of them.

  The sun warms the upturned soil and my arm.

  Spring moves through me like an armada of light.

  Report of the 14th Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group

  This is how things begin to tilt into change,

  how coalitions are knit from strands of hair,

  of barbed wire, twine, knitting wool and gut,

  how people ease into action arguing each inch,

  but the tedium of it is watching granite erode.

  Let us meet to debate meeting, the day, the time,

  the length. Let us discuss whether we will sit

  or stand or hang from the ceiling or take it lying

  down. Let us argue about the chair and the table and

  the chairperson and the motion to table the chair.

  In the room fog gathers under the ceiling and thickens

  in every brain. Let us form committees spawning

  subcommittees all laying little moldy eggs of reports.

  Under the grey fluorescent sun they will crack

  to hatch scuttling lizards of more committees.

  The Pliocene gathers momentum and fades.

  The earth tilts on its axis. More and more snows

  fall each winter and less melt each spring.

  A new ice age is pressing the glaciers forward

  over the floor. We watch the wall of ice advance.

  We are evolving into molluscs, barnacles

  clinging to wood and plastic, metal and smoke

  while the stale and flotsam-laden tide of rhetoric

  inches up the shingles and dawdles back.

  This is true virtue: to sit here and stay awake,

  to listen, to argue, to wade on through the muck

  wrestling to some momentary small agreement

  like a pinhead pearl prized from a dragon-oyster.

  I believe in this democracy as I believe

  there is blood in my veins, but oh, oh, in me

  lurks a tyrant with a double-bladed ax who longs

  to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand

  and shriek, You Shall Do as I Say, pig-bastards.

  No more committees but only picnics and orgies

  and dances. I have spoken. So be it forevermore.

  True romance

  In a room with a nylon carpet and a daybed

  a woman is dancing with her eyes on the TV set.

  The face of the singer gluts. For her

  he is singing, this face more familiar

  than any lover’s, this man she has carried

  wrapped like a chocolate in the crisp paper

  of her heart since she was fifteen.

  She loves him, she loves him, for him

  she dances, thrusting her hips, arms reaching,

  churning her mons at his face bigger than

  the face of her husband and closer,

  more real than the smell of her own sweat.

  O sunbright hero whose strut is paid for

  by Japanese cars, by computers, by lite beer.

  O lithe bodies the camera fills with buttercream

  of wishes, bodies thin and flawless as blank paper,

  bodies with nipples and navels taped, bodies

  on which the clothes are glued, faces coated

  with polyurethane, how many men paw at their

  wives’ flesh trying to unearth your vinyl.

  Things move fast in that bright world. A man

  sees a woman across a room an
d she smiles

  only at him. After a diet soda commercial,

  she is in bed with him. In the next scene

  she is gone and his buddy the talking dog

  goes at his side. Then the cars chase each other

  off cliffs into balls of flame. The hero

  steps out with a grin promising he will unzip

  you, walk into the set of your head, turn up

  the brightness and volume control till you

  become real too, as the box glued to your eyes.

  Woman in the bushes

  A snail easing gingerly

  tasting the morning’s dangers with soft

  gelatinous eyestalks probing

  she shuffles forward, her only house

  her back bearing all her clothes

  and her shopping cart piled with

  blanket roll, her Sterno, pan and bottle,

  her photographs wilted like flowers.

  This fall she sleeps in a rhodo-

  dendron thicket in the park,

  withdrawing deep among the leathery

  leaves when twilight makes of grass

  a minefield of exploding boys.

  While the joggers prance past,

  the cyclists in neon gear,

  she wriggles out, washes

  at a fountain, fills her bottle.

  In the hollow among oaks shedding

  she squats where the police

  cannot see and heats beans.

  Nothing human separates

  us like comfort.

  A local doctor describes a body dead

  of exposure last winter: multiparous,

  more than one child delivered.

  Her teeth revealed a life once affluent.

  Hunger sucked her like a spider.

  We despise what isn’t new. We toss

  half of what we buy. Things are made

  to break and we discard them. Excess

  people take longer to get rid of

  but they biodegrade nicely.

  It just takes time and weather.

  Apple sauce for Eve

  Those old daddies cursed you and us in you,

  damned for your curiosity: for your sin

  was wanting knowledge. To try, to taste,

  to take into the body, into the brain

  and turn each thing, each sign, each factoid

  round and round as new facets glint and white

  fractures into colors and the image breaks

  into crystal fragments that pierce the nerves

  while the brain casts the chips into patterns.

  Each experiment sticks a finger deep in the pie,

  dares existence, blows a horn in the ear

  of belief, lets the nasty and difficult brats

  of real questions into the still air

  of the desiccated parlor of stasis.

  What we all know to be true, constant,

  melts like frost landscapes on a window

  in a jet of steam. How many last words

  in how many dead languages would translate into,

  But what happens if I, and Whoops!

  We see Adam wagging his tail, good dog, good

  dog, while you and the snake shimmy up the tree,

  lab partners in a dance of will and hunger,

  that thirst not of the flesh but of the brain.

  Men always think women are wanting sex,

  cock, snake, when it is the world she’s after.

  Then birth trauma for the first conceived kid

  of the ego, I think therefore I am, I

  kick the tree, who am I, why am I,

  going, going to die, die, die.

  You are indeed the mother of invention,

  the first scientist. Your name means

  life: finite, dynamic, swimming against

  the current of time, tasting, testing,

  eating knowledge like any other nutrient.

  We are all the children of your bright hunger.

  We are all products of that first experiment,

  for if death was the worm in that apple,

  the seeds were freedom and the flowering of choice.

  The Book of Ruth and Naomi

  When you pick up the Tanakh and read

  the Book of Ruth, it is a shock

  how little it resembles memory.

  It’s concerned with inheritance,

  lands, men’s names, how women

  must wiggle and wobble to live.

  Yet women have kept it dear

  for the beloved elder who

  cherished Ruth, more friend than

  daughter. Daughters leave. Ruth

  brought even the baby she made

  with Boaz home as a gift.

  Where you go, I will go too,

  your people shall be my people,

  I will be a Jew for you,

  for what is yours I will love

  as I love you, oh Naomi

  my mother, my sister, my heart.

  Show me a woman who does not dream

  a double, heart’s twin, a sister

  of the mind in whose ear she can whisper,

  whose hair she can braid as her life

  twists its pleasure and pain and shame.

  Show me a woman who does not hide

  in the locket of bone that deep

  eye beam of fiercely gentle love

  she had once from mother, daughter,

  sister; once like a warm moon

  that radiance aligned the tides

  of her blood into potent order.

  At the season of first fruits we remember

  those travelers, coconspirators, scavengers

  making do with leftovers and mill ends,

  whose friendship was stronger than fear,

  stronger than hunger, who walked together

  down death’s dusty road, hands joined.

  Of the patience called forth by transition

  Notice how the sky is a milky opal

  cloudless from rim to rim, of an indefinite

  height and sliding now at midafternoon

  into darkness. Pearly, it melts

  imperceptibly into yellow and green,

  willow colors from another season,

  or the yellow of aspen leaves already fallen,

  into lavender now, the sea lavender

  shriveled in the marshes. As the trees

  reduce themselves to bony gesture

  and the woods echo the hues of earth

  itself, the colors of the light must feed

  our eye’s hunger, the ruddy sun of winter.

  In early spring, we look down for color,

  we look for the green of skunk cabbage,

  golden crocuses along the south wall,

  the small ears of violets unfolding.

  Before the snows that glaze and magnify,

  glitter and transmute, we look upward.

  Great Chinese peonies float over the bay

  splendid, bronzed by the light rebounding

  from the water. In November we gaze up

  into the stormy garden of the clouds.

  What comes to us rides on the wind

  and we face into it like gulls, waiting.

  I have always been poor at flirting

  I know it’s harmless. My friends who flirt

  the hardest—consummate, compulsive—are least

  apt to fall into bed on a hot night’s wind.

  Flirting is what they do instead of sex,

  five-year affairs of eyes and telephone trysts,

  voices soft as warm taffy, artful laughs,

  a hush when the spouse walks through the room.

  Yet when I flirt I feel like an elephant

  in a pink tutu balancing on a beach ball,

  a tabby wearing a doll’s dress, stuffed

  in a carriage, about to snarl and slash.

  I am pretending to be a girl, a girly girl.

  A smile hangs on my fa
ce like a loose shutter.

  My voice is petroleum jelly on my tongue.

  My mother flirted with the milkman, the iceman,

  the butcher—oh he winked and strutted,

  flashing his gold tooth and slapping the scale.

  Ogling, the plumber fixed both leaks

  for the price of one. She flirted with the mailman,

  the paperboy who brought our paper and only ours

  to the door. I’d watch sour as a rotten lemon,

  dour as a grandfather clock, cringing, muttering

  Mother! like the curse word it was. The walls

  would drip perfumed oil. The ceiling sagged buttery.

  Her eyes were screwed wide open, Betty Boop,

  batting butterfly wings, her mouth pursed,

  while she played them like saxophones,

  her voice now a tiny plush mouse,

  now sleeking into the lower registers

  of dark honey lapping at the belly.

  When we couldn’t pay the mortgage, she almost

  climbed into the bank manager’s lap.

  Motorcycle cops pulling over our sputtering car,

  teachers, principals, my father’s bosses,

  she had only one weapon, shameless silent

  promises redeemable for absolutely nothing

  but an ego job on the spot, frothing over.

  If afterward she called them behayma,

  fool, it was with quiet satisfaction,

  an athlete who has performed well and won.

  I remember the puzzled damaged look in her

  widened eyes when flirting began to fail.

  For some it is a drug of choice,

  a moment’s cocaine spiking the ego, giving

  that spurt of a mirror cooing attraction.

  For me it means only, I am powerless,

  you can hurt or help me, wedged there above,

  so I attempt this awkward dance of the broken