by Marge Piercy
I see you in my mother at thirty
in her flapper gear, skinny legs
and then you knocking on the tight dress.
We hand you down like a prize feather quilt,
our female shame and sunburst strength.
The flying Jew
I never met my uncle Dave.
The most real thing I know about him
is how he died, which he did
again and again in the middle of the night
my mother screaming, my father shouting,
“Shut up, Bert, you’re having a bad dream.”
My uncle Dave, the recurring nightmare.
He was the Jew who flew.
How did he manage it? Flying was for
gentlemen, and he was a kid from the slums
of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland—
zaydeh one headlong leap ahead of the law
and the Pinkertons, the goons who finally
bashed his head in when he was organizing
his last union, the bakery workers.
Dave looked up between the buildings,
higher than the filthy sparrows who pecked
at horse dung and the pigeons who strutted
and cooed in the tenement eaves,
up to the grey clouds of Philadelphia,
the rust clouds of Pittsburgh with the fires
of the open hearth steel mills staining them,
a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night.
He followed into the clouds.
My mother doesn’t know who taught
him to fly, but he learned.
He became one with the plane, they said.
Off he went to France. He flew in combat,
was shot down and survived, never
became an ace, didn’t enjoy combat,
the killing, but flying was better than sex.
He took my mother up once and she wept
the whole time. She wouldn’t fly again
till she was seventy-five and said then
she didn’t care if the plane went down.
It was his only talent, his only passion
and a good plane was a perfect fit for
his body and his mind, his reflexes.
The earth was something that clung to his shoes,
something to shake off, something to gather
all your strength into a taut charge
and then launch forward and leave behind.
After the war, he was lost for two years,
tried selling, tried insurance, then off
he went barnstorming with his war buddies.
Time on the ground was just stalling time,
killing time, parked in roominghouses
and tourist homes and bedbug hotels.
He drank little. Women were aspirin.
Being the only Jew, he had something
to prove every day, so he flew the fastest,
he did the final trick that made the audience
shriek. The planes grew older, the crowds
thinned out. One fall day outside Cleveland
he got his mother, sister Bert and her
little boy to watch the act. It was a triple
Zimmerman roll he had done five hundred
shows but this time the plane plowed
into the earth and a fireball rose.
So every six months he died flaming
in the middle of the night, and all I
ever knew of him was Mother screaming.
My rich uncle, whom I only met three times
We were never invited to his house.
We went there once while they were all in Hawaii,
climbed steps from which someone had shoveled
the snow, not him, to the wide terrace.
Yellow brick, the house peered into fir and juniper.
It was too large for me to imagine what it held
but I was sure everyone of them, four girls
and bony wife, each had a room of her own.
He had been a magician and on those rare
nights he had to stay at the Detroit Statler
downtown, he would summon us for supper
in the hotel restaurant. Mother would put on
and take off every dress in her closet, all six,
climb in the swaybacked brown Hudson muttering shame.
He would do tricks with his napkin and pull
quarters from my ears and spoons from his sleeves.
He had been a clumsy acrobat, he had failed at comedy
and vaudeville; he was entertaining for a party
when he met a widow with four girls and an inheritance.
He waltzed right out of her romantic movie dreams
and he strolled into her house and she had him redone.
He learned to talk almost like her dead husband.
He learned to wear suits, play golf and give orders
to servants. His name changed, his background rebuilt,
his religion painted over, he almost fit in.
Of my uncles, only he was unreal, arriving by plane
to stay on the fanciest street in downtown Detroit.
The waiter brought a phone to the table, his broker
calling. I imagined a cowboy breaking horses.
He made knives disappear. He made a napkin vanish.
He was like an animated suit, no flesh, no emotions
bubbling the blood and steaming the windows as
my other uncles and aunts did. Only the discreet
Persian leather smell of money droned in my nose.
His longest trick was to render himself invisible.
Then one night after the guests had left, he went down
to the basement in the latest multilevel glass vast
whatnot shelf of house and hanged himself by the furnace.
They did not want his family at the funeral. She had
no idea, his wife said, why would he be depressed?
I remember his laugh like a cough and his varnished
face, buffed till the silverware shone in his eyes.
His last trick was to vanish himself forever.
Your standard midlife crisis
A friend is destroying his life
like a set of dishes
he has tired of, is breaking
for the noise.
The old wife is older
of course. She promises
nothing but what he knows
he can have.
She is an oak rocking chair,
sturdy, plain, shapely
something he has taken comfort
in for years.
This one flirts like a firefly,
on and off, on and off.
Where will she flash next?
In his pocket.
She mirrors his needs,
she sends him messages to decode
twisted in his hair, knotted
in his skin.
With me you will forget failure.
With me you will be another.
My youth will shave your years
to smooth fresh skin.
O real life, I feel! he says,
his infatuation, a charge
like fourteen cups of espresso
and as lasting.
He careens downhill, throwing off
books, children, history,
tossing friends, pledges, knowledge
down into crystal canyon.
There every cliff reflects her
face with the eyes illuminating
him like fireworks, doomed
to burn themselves out.
The visitation
The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild
tulips opening like stars fallen on the ground.
She leans gracefully to taste a tarda,
yellow and white sunburst, sees us, stops,
uncertain. Stares at us with her head cocked.
What are you? She is not frightened
but bemused. Do I know you?
The landscaping dazzles her, impresses her
far more than the two of us on the driveway
speaking to her in the same tone we use
with the cats as if she had become our pet,
as she sidles among the peach trees,
a pink blossom clinging to her dun flank.
Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents: she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with the huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.
Half vulture, half eagle
I saw it last night, the mortgage
bird with heavy hunched shoulders
nesting in shredded hundred dollar bills
its long curved claws seize, devour.
You feed it and feed it in hopes
it will grow smaller. Does this make
sense? After five years of my writing
checks on the first day of every month
it is swollen and red eyed and hungry.
It has passed from owner to owner,
sold by the bank to Ohio and thence
to an ersatz company that buys up slave
mortgages and is accountable to Panama
or perhaps Luxembourg, cannot be
communicated with by less than four lawyers
connected end to end like Christmas
tree light sets and blinking in six
colors simultaneously by fax.
It says, I squat on the foot of your
bed when the medical bills shovel in.
When your income withers like corn
stalks in a Kansas drought, I laugh
with a sound of sand hitting a windshield,
laughter dry as parched kernels from which
all water has been stolen by the sun.
Each month I wring you a little more.
I own a corner of your house, say
the northeast corner the storms hit
when they roar from the blast of the sea
churned into grey sudsy cliffs, and as
the storm bashes the dunes into sand
it washes away, so I can carry off
your house any time you fail to feed
me promptly. Your misfortune is my
best gamble. I am the mortgage bird
and my weight is on your back.
The level
A great balance hangs in the sky
and briefly on the black pan
and on the blue pan, the melon
of the moon and the blood orange
of the sun are symmetrical
like two unmatched eyes glowing
at us with one desire.
This is an instant’s equality,
a level that at once
starts to dip. In spring
the sun starts up its golden
engine earlier each dawn.
In fall, night soaks
its dye into the edges of day.
But now they hang, two bright
balls teasing us to balance
the halves of our brain, need
and will, gut and intellect,
you and me in an instant’s grace—
understanding no woman, even
Gaia, can always make it work.
The negative ion dance
The ocean reopens us.
The brass doors in the forehead swing wide.
Light enters us like a swarm of bees
and bees turn into white petals falling.
The lungs expand as the salt air
stretches them, and they sing, treble
bagpipes eerie and serpentine.
The bones lighten to balsa wood.
The head bobs on air currents
like a bright blue balloon without ballast.
The arms want to flap. The terns
dive around us giving hopeless instruction.
Light is sharp, serrated, a flight of saws.
Light enters us and is absorbed like water,
like radiation. We take the light in
and darken it. We look just the same.
We shine only in the back of the eyes
if you stare into them as you kiss.
The light leaks out through the palms
as they caress you later in the dark.
The voice of the grackle
Among the red winged blackbirds—
latecomers clustered at the top
of the sugar maple after the others
have split up the better home sites
in the marshes, along Dun’s Run—
their buzzes, chirs and warbles,
I hear a rasp, a harsh ruckus.
The grackles have come north again.
Nobody greets them with the joy
meted out to robins, the geese
rowing high overhead, the finches
flitting gold and red to the feeders.
I am their solitary welcoming
committee, tossing extra corn.
Their cries are no more melodious
than the screech of unadjusted
brakes, and yet I like their song
of the unoiled door hinge creaking,
the rusty saw grating, the squawk
of an air mattress stomped on,
unmistakable among the twitters.
They are big and shiny, handsome
even sulking in the rain.
Feathers gleam like the polish
on a new car when the sun hits them,
black as asphalt, with oil slick
colors shimmering, purple satin
like hoods in their gang colors.
We never see more than a few,
often one alone, like the oversized
kid who hangs out, misfit, with
the younger crowd, slumps at the back
of the classroom making offcolor
comments in his cracking voice,
awkward, half clown, half hero.
Salt in the afternoon
The room is a conch shell
and echoing in it, the blood
rushes in the ears,
the surf of desire sliding in
on the warm beach.
The room is the shell of the moon
snail, gorgeous predator
whose shell winds round and round
the color of moonshine
on your pumping back.
The bed is a slipper shell
on which we rock, opaline
and pearled with light sweat,
two great deep currents
colliding into white water.
The clamshell opens.
The oyster is eaten.
The squid shoots its white ink.
Now there is nothing but warm
salt puddles on the flats.
Brotherless one: Sun god
In a family snapshot I stand in pigtails
grinning. I hug the two pillars
of my cracked world, my cold
father, my hot brother, the fair and the ruddy,
the grey eyed forbidder, the one who hit
but never caressed, who shouted
but never praised; and on the
left, you.
You were the dark pulsating sun of my childhood,
the man whose eyes could give water
instead of ice, eyes brown as tree bark.
You were the one I looked like, as even
your children looked more like me
than like their mothers. All had the same
dark slanted Tartar eyes glinting like blades
and the same black hair rippling—
coarse, abundant, grass of a tundra of night.
We are small and scrappy.
We go for the throat in anger.
We have bad genes and good minds.
We drag a load of peacock tales sweeping the dust.
Myths come into life around us
like butterflies hatching, bright and voracious.
We learned sex easily as we learned to talk
and it shaped our handshakes and our laughter.
Trouble was our shadow, tied to our heels.
Thus we grew out of the same mother
but never spoke real words since I turned twelve.
Yet you built into my psyche that space
for a man not of ice and thumbtacks,
a man who could think with his body,
a man who could laugh from the soles
of his feet, a man who could touch
skin simply as sun does.
You gave me a license
for the right of the body to joy.
Brotherless two: Palimpsest
My friend Elizabeth said, the week you died
and your widow would not have me at
your funeral: you and your brother
both had great wild imaginations.
You put yours into books.
He rewrote himself.
I can remember the last honest talking that ever
went between us, strong, jolting to me
as straight bourbon to a child not used to beer.
You were just back from the war,
still a Marine, crazy on experimental