by Marge Piercy
All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,
Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,
Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,
Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:
the names flesh out our histories, our choices,
our passions and what we will never embody
but pass by with respect. When I consecrate
my body in the temple of our history,
when I pledge myself to remain empty
and clear for the voices coming through
I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.
Habondia, the real abundance, is the power
to say yes and to say no, to open
and to close, to take or to leave
and not to be taken by force or law
or fear or poverty or hunger or need.
To bear children or not to bear by choice
is holy. To bear children unwanted
is to be used like a public sewer.
To be sterilized unchosen is to have
your heart cut out. To love women
is holy and holy is the free love of men
and precious to live taking whichever comes
and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.
Praise the lives you did not choose.
They will heal you, tell your story, fight
for you. You eat the bread of their labor.
You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you
after I went under the surgeon’s knife
for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet
an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.
Then my womb learned to open on the full
moon without pain and my pleasure deepened
till my body shuddered like troubled water.
When my friend gave birth I held her in joy
as the child’s head thrust from her vagina
like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.
Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway
open to us was taken by squads of fighting
women who paid years of trouble and struggle,
who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives
that we might walk through these gates upright.
Doorways are sacred to women for we
are the doorways of life and we must choose
what comes in and what goes out. Freedom
is our real abundance.
Tumbling and with tangled mane
COLL
1.
I wade in milk.
Only beige sand exists as the floor
of a slender nave before me.
Mewing fishhook cries of gulls
pierce the white from what must be up.
The fog slides over me like a trained
snake leaving salt on my lips. Somewhere
I can hear the ocean breathing.
The world is a benign jellyfish.
I float inhaling water that tastes
of iodine and thin bright blood.
2.
We squat on a sandbar digging as the tide
turns and runs to bury the crosshatched scales,
the ribs of the bottom as if the ebbing
of waters exposed that the world is really
a giant flounder. As we wade landward
the inrushing tide is so cold
my ankles ring like glass bells.
We lie belly up baking as the ocean
ambles toward us nibbling the sand.
Out to sea a fog bank stands like world’s
end, the sharp place where boats fall off.
3.
When a storm halts, people get into their
cars. They don’t start picking up yet, the bough
that crashed on the terrace, the window
shattered. No, they rush with foot hard down
on the accelerator over the wet winding black
topped roads where the pine and oak start out
normal size and get smaller till they are
forests for mice. Cars line up on the bluff
facing waves standing tall as King Kong,
skyscrapers smashed before a giant wrecking ball.
Mad water avalanches. You can’t hear.
Your hair fills with wet sand. Your windshield
is being sandblasted and will blind you as the sun
burns a hole in the mist like a cigarette
through a tablecloth and sets fire to the air.
4.
A dream, two hundred times the same. The shore
can be red rocks, black or grey, sand dunes
or barrier reef. The sun blazes. The sky
roars a hard blue, blue as policemen.
The water is kicking. The waves leap
at the shore like flames out of control.
The sea gnashes snow capped mountains
that hurl themselves end over end, blocking
the sky. A tidal wave eats the land. Rearing
and galloping, tumbling and with tangled
mane the horses of the surf with mad eyes,
with snorting nostrils and rattling hooves
stampede at the land. I am in danger
yet I do not run. I am rooted watching
knowing that what I watch
is also me.
Making makes guilt. Cold fierce mother
who gouges deep into this pamet, who
rests her dragon’s belly on the first rocks,
older than land, older than memory,
older than life, my power is so little
it makes me laugh how in my dreaming
lemur’s mind making poems or tales or revolution is this storm on a clear day.
Of course danger and power mingle in all
birthing. We die by what we live by.
Again and again that dream comes when I set
off journeying to the back of my mind,
the bottom of the library, a joust with
what is: the sun a fiery spider high
overhead, the colors bright and clear as glass,
the sea raging at the coast, always about
to overrun it, as in the eye of a hurricane
when the waves roll cascading in undiminished
but for a moment and in that place the air
is still, the moment of clarity out
of time at the center of an act.
Cutting the grapes free
MUIN
In spring the vine looks like a crucified
witch tied hard to high wires strung
from weathered posts. Those shaggy tormented
limbs shall never flow with sap,
dry as bones the ants have polished,
inert, resistant as obsidian.
Then from the first velvet buds tearing
open the wands stretch bouquets of skinny
serpents coiling along the wires to bury
them in rampant swelling leaves, a dense
fluttering cascade of heavy green over
the trellis and path, climbing the pine.
Now the grapes swell in the sun yellow
and black and ruby mounds of breast
and testicle, the image of ripe flesh
rounding warm to the fingers. The wasps
and bees drone drunken, our lips, our
tongues stained purple with juice, and sweet.
We bleed when we blossom from the straight
grainy pine of girlhood. We bleed when we taste
first of men. We bleed when we bear and when
we don’t. Vine, from my blood is fermented
poetry and from yours wine that tunes my sinews
and nerves till they sing instead of screeching.
I do not seek immortality, to be a rock
which only dissolves in slow motion,
but to age well like good wine harsh young
but fit to lay down, the best of me
; in the dark of libraries and minds to be taken
with care into the light and savored.
I do not seek to leap free from the wheel
of change but to dance in that turning.
What depends more on the seasons
and the years than wine: whether rains come,
the pounding hail, the searing drought,
the lethal hoar kiss of the frost?
In this glass the Mosel pale as straw
shines with the sun of a spent year
and pricks my tongue with tiny bubbles
that were not in it last week. The vines
of its home are blossoming and the wine
remembers its natal soil as I must.
The press of the years bears down
on us till we bleed from every pore
yet in our cells sun is stored in honey
ready to be spilled or to nurture.
Like wine I must finally trust myself
to other tongues or turn to vinegar.
The perpetual migration
GORT
How do we know where we are going?
How do we know where we are headed
till we in fact or hope or hunch
arrive? You can only criticize,
the comfortable say, you don’t know
what you want. Ah, but we do.
We have swung in the green verandas
of the jungle trees. We have squatted
on cloud-grey granite hillsides where
every leaf drips. We have crossed
badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.
We have paddled into the tall dark sea
in canoes. We always knew.
Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
and not too much Monday morning,
a chance to choose, a chance to grow,
the power to say no and yes, pretties
and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.
The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows
like a computer, like a violinist, like
a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember
backwards a little and sometimes forwards,
but mostly we think in the ebbing circles
a rock makes on the water.
The salmon hurtling upstream seeks
the taste of the waters of its birth
but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile
trek follows charts mapped on its genes.
The brightness, the angle, the sighting
of the stars shines in the brain luring
till inner constellation matches outer.
The stark black rocks, the island beaches
of waveworn pebbles where it will winter
look right to it. Months after it set
forth it says, home at last, and settles.
Even the pigeon beating its short whistling
wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.
In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips
and the moon pulls blood from my womb.
Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown
off course yet if I turn back it feels
wrong. Navigating by chart and chance
and passion I will know the shape
of the mountains of freedom, I will know.
The great horned owl
NGETAL
I wake after midnight and hear
you hunting: that sound seems to lodge
in the nape like a hollow bullet,
a rhythmic hooting plaintive as if
you seduced your prey by pity.
How you swoop from the dark of the trees
against the blackest blue sky of the November
full moon, your wings spread wide as my
arms, rough heavy sails rigged for a storm.
The moon blinds me as she glides in ripping
skeins of cloud. On your forehead you bear
her crescents, your eyes hypnotic
as her clock-face disc. Gale force winds
strip crispened leaves from the branches
and try the strength of the wood. The weakest
die now, giving back their bodies
for the white sheet of the snow to cover.
Now my cats are not let out after sunset
because you own the night. After two years
you return to my land. I fear and protect
you, come to harry the weak in the long dark.
Pellets of mouse and bird and shrew bone
I will find at the base of the pines.
You have come to claim your nest again
in the old white oak whose heart is thick
with age, and in the dead of the winter
when the snow has wept into ice and frozen
and been buried again in snow and crusted over,
you will give birth before the willow buds
swell and all night you will hunt for those
first babies of the year, downy owlets shivering.
Waking to hear you I touch the warm back
of my lover sleeping beside me on his stomach
like a child.
The longest night
RUIS
The longest night is long drawn
as a freight blocking a grade crossing
in a prairie town when I am trying
to reach Kansas City to sleep and one
boxcar clatters after the other, after
and after in faded paint proclaiming
as they trundle through the headlights
names of 19th-century fortunes, scandals,
labor wars. Stalled between factory
and cemetery I lean on the cold wheel.
The factory is still, the machines
turned off; the cemetery looks boring
and factual as a parking lot. Too cold
for the dead to stir, tonight even
my own feel fragile as brown bags
carted to the dump. Ash stains the air.
Wheels of the freight clack by. Snow
hisses on the windshield of the rented car.
Always a storm at the winter solstice.
New moon, no moon, old moon dying,
moon that gives no light, stub
of a candle, dark lantern, face
without features, the zone of zero:
I feel the blood starting. Monthly
my womb opens on the full moon but
my body is off its rhythms. I am
jangled and raw. I do not celebrate
this blood seeping as from a wound.
I feel my weakness summoning me
like a bed of soft grey ashes
I might crawl into.
Here in the pit of the year scars overlap
scabs, the craters of the moon, stone
breaking stone. In the rearview mirror
my black hair fades into the night,
my cheeks look skeletal, my dark eyes,
holes a rat might hide in. I sense
death lurking up the road like a feral
dog abroad in the swirling snow.
Defeat, defeat, defeat, tedious
as modern headstones, regular as dentures.
My blood tastes salty as tears and rusty
as an old nail. Yet as I kick the car
over the icy tracks toward nowhere
I want to be, I am grinning. Lady, it’s been
worse before, bad as the moon burning,
bad as the moon’s horn goring my side,
that to give up now is a joke told
by the FBI minding the tap or the binoculars
staking me out on such a bitter night
when the blood slows and begins to freeze.
I grew up among these smoke-pitted houses
choking over the railroad between the factory
shuddering and the cemetery for the urban
poor, and I got out. They say that�
��s
what you ask for. And how much more
I ask. To get everybody out.
Hecate, lady of the crossroads, vampires
of despair you loose and the twittering
bats of sleepless fear. The three-headed
dog barking in the snow obeys you.
Tonight I honor you, lady of last things.
Without you to goad me I would lie
late in the warm bed of the flesh.
The blood I coughed from my lungs that year
you stood at the foot of my bed was sour,
acrid, the taste of promises broken
and since then I have run twice as fast.
Your teeth are in me, like tiny headstones.
This moon is the void around which the serpent
with its tail in its mouth curls.
Where there is no color, no light,
no sound, what is? The dark of the mind.
In terror begins vision. In silence
I learn my song, here at the stone
nipple, the black moon bleeding,
the egg anonymous as water,
the night that goes on and on,
a tunnel through the earth.
At the well
BETH
Though I’m blind now and age
has gutted me to rubbing bones
knotted up in a leather sack
like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.
It happened near that well by Peniel
where the water runs copper cold
even in drought. Sore and dusty
I was traveling my usual rounds
wary of strangers, for some men
think nothing of setting on any woman
alone, doctoring a bit, setting bones,
herbs and simples I know well,
divining for water with a switch,
selling my charms of odd shaped bones
and stones with fancy names to less
skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,
a husband, or relief from one.
The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.
When I woke up at midnight it had come,
not he, I thought, not she but a presence furious
as a goat about to butt.
Amused as those yellow eyes
sometimes seem just before the hind