Circles on the Water

by Marge Piercy

  which you occasionally drop:

  gross man with iron heels

  who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning,

  who hammers on scaffolding all night long,

  who entertains sumo wrestlers and fat acrobats—

  I pass you on the steps, we smile and nod.

  Rage swells in me like gas.

  Now rage too keeps me awake.

  The friend

  We sat across the table.

  he said, cut off your hands.

  they are always poking at things.

  they might touch me.

  I said yes.

  Food grew cold on the table.

  he said, burn your body.

  it is not clean and smells like sex.

  it rubs my mind sore.

  I said yes.

  I love you, I said.

  That’s very nice, he said

  I like to be loved,

  that makes me happy.

  Have you cut off your hands yet?

  The morning half-life blues

  Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work

  in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.

  The shop windows snicker

  flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:

  you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

  Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning

  we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,

  the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,

  that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,

  lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,

  and need barter ourselves for nothing.

  not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,

  that party to which no one will give or sell us the key

  though we have all thought briefly we found it

  drunk or in bed.

  Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,

  plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and strawberry breasts,

  swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,

  the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry

  and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.

  Living is later. This is your rented death.

  You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts

  to make up, to pay for each day

  which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,

  afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

  Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,

  you will be less at forty than at twenty.

  Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.

  I would fix you like buds to a city where people work

  to make and do things necessary and good,

  where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks

  where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

  Erasure

  Falling out of love

  is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.

  It hurts more than you will remember.

  It costs a pint of blood turned grey

  and burning out a few high paths

  among the glittering synapses of the brain,

  a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy,

  a configuration gone

  imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst

  that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.

  When falling out of love is correcting vision

  light grates on the eyes

  light files the optic nerve hot and raw.

  To find you have loved a coward and a fool

  is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst

  and take away your hands covered with small festering bites

  and let the mouse go in a grey blur

  into the baseboard.

  The cyclist

  Eleven-thirty and hot.

  Cotton air.

  Dry hands cupped.

  The shadow of an empty chandelier

  swings on a refrigerator door.

  In the street a voice is screaming.

  Your head scurries with ants.

  Anyone’s arms drip with your sweat,

  anyone’s pliant belly

  absorbs your gymnastic thrusts

  as your fury subsides into butter.

  You are always in combat with questionnaires.

  You are always boxing headless dolls

  of cherry pudding.

  You are the tedious marksman in a forest of thighs,

  you with tomcat’s shrapnel memory

  and irritable eyes.

  Tenderness is a mosquito on your arm.

  Your hands are calloused with careless touch.

  You believe in luck and a quick leap forward

  that does not move you.

  You rub your sore pride into moist bodies

  and pedal off, slightly displeased.

  Juan’s twilight dance

  Nobody understood Juan.

  Slight, amiable, he did not stand upon ceremony

  but was unfailingly polite.

  Men liked him: he deferred with wry grace

  though his pride was sore and supple with constant use.

  He was fascinated by mirrors and women’s eyes.

  When he spoke of the past he was always alone

  half in shadow among shadowy forms.

  No one in his stories had names. No one had faces.

  He watched himself but did not listen to his voice.

  Words were water or weapons.

  He was always in love with the body that burned his eyes.

  His need shone in the dark and the light, always new.

  He could not bear suspense or indifference.

  He had to be closed into love on the instant

  while his need gleamed like a knife and the words spurted.

  He never understood what the women minded.

  He never could see how he cheated them

  with words, the mercury words no one could grasp

  as they gleamed and slipped and darted.

  In the woman’s eyes he saw himself.

  He was compiling a woman he would have to love.

  He was building a woman out of a hill of bodies.

  The sadness of his closets: hundreds of arms,

  thousands of hollow and deflated breasts,

  necks and thighs smooth as new cars,

  forests of hair waving and limp.

  Why do they mind? They do not learn.

  Time after time they grapple to win back from him

  what gleamed in his face before:

  the mask of desperate beautiful need

  which each woman claims.

  They chase each other through his hard flesh.

  The bed is his mirror.

  He spends into peace and indifference. He sleeps.

  He is unfailingly polite, even with Donna Elvira

  howling outside his door and breaking glass.

  They always lose.

  Learning experience

  The boy sits in the classroom

  in Gary, in the United States, in NATO, in SEATO

  in the thing-gorged belly of the sociobeast

  in fluorescent light in slowly moving time

  in boredom thick and greasy as vegetable shortening.

  The classroom has green boards and ivory blinds,

  the desks are new and the teachers not so old.

  I have come out on the train from Chicago to talk

  about dangling participles. I am supposed

  to teach him to think a little on demand.

  The time of tomorrow’s draft exam is written on the board.

  The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary

  where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke

  and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel

 
while the slag goes out in little dumpcars smoking,

  but even less does he want to be in Today’s Action Army

  in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,

  in death that hurts.

  In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,

  French irregular verbs, the names of friends

  around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon

  where tomorrow he will try and fail his license to live.

  Half past home

  Morning rattles the tall spike fence.

  Already the old are set out to get dirty in the sun

  spread like drying coverlets around the garden

  by straggly hedges smelling of tomcat.

  From the steep oxblood hospital

  hunched under its miser’s frown of roof,

  dishes mutter, pumps work, an odor

  of disinfectant slops into the street

  toward the greygreen quadrangles of the university.

  Pickets with the facts of their poverty hoisted on sticks

  turn in the street like a tattered washing.

  The trustees decline to negotiate

  for this is a charitable institution.

  Among the houses of the poor and black nearby

  a crane nods waist-high among broken bedrooms.

  Already the university digs foundations

  to be hallowed with the names of old trustees.

  The dish and bottle washers, the orderlies march

  carrying the crooked sick toward death on their backs.

  The neighborhood is being cured of poverty.

  Busses will carry the moppushers in and out.

  Are the old dying too slowly in their garden?

  Under elms spacious and dusty

  as roominghouse porches the old men mutter

  that they are closing the north wing,

  for the land is valuable when you get down to it

  and they will, down to the prairie dog bones.

  This is the Home for Incurables: and the old are.

  Many are the diseases that trustees are blind to,

  or call incurable, like their own blindness

  wide as the hoarse wind blows, mile after mile

  where the city smokes sweetly as a barbecue

  or sizzles like acid under nobody’s sun.

  Simple-song

  When we are going toward someone we say

  you are just like me

  your thoughts are my brothers and sisters

  word matches word

  how easy to be together.

  When we are leaving someone we say

  how strange you are

  we cannot communicate

  we can never agree

  how hard, hard and weary to be together.

  We are not different nor alike

  but each strange in our leather bodies

  sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands

  and loving is an act

  that cannot outlive

  the open hand

  the open eye

  the door in the chest standing open.

  For Jeriann’s hands

  for Jeriann Hilderley

  When I hug you, you are light as a grasshopper.

  Your bones are ashwood the Indians used for bows.

  You bend and spring back and can burn the touch,

  a woman with hands that know how to pick things up.

  Stiff as frozen rope words poke out

  lopsided, in a fierce clothespin treble.

  You move with a grace that is all function,

  you move like a bow drawn taut and released.

  Sometimes your wrists are transparent.

  Sometimes an old buffalo man

  frozen on the prairie stares from your face.

  Your hair and eyes are the color of creek

  running in the afternoon opaque under slanted sun.

  You are stubborn and hardy as a rubber mat.

  You are light as a paper airplane and as elegant

  and you can fly.

  The secret of moving heavy objects is balance, you said

  in a grey loft full of your sculpture,

  figures piercing or hung on boundaries,

  leaping their thresholds, impaled on broken mirrors,

  passing and gone into new space.

  Objects born from you are mended, makeshift.

  Their magic rides over rust and splinters and nails,

  over shards of glass and cellophane beginning to rip.

  Fragments of your work litter the banks of minor highways,

  shattered faces of your icons lie on Hoboken junkyards,

  float as smog over the East River,

  grow black with the dust of abandoned coalbins.

  One summer you made small rooms of wax

  where people stood in taut ellipses staring and blind

  with tenderness, with agony, with question and domestic terror.

  They were candles burning.

  You wanted to cast them in bronze but could not afford to.

  The August sun melted them all.

  The dancers in your plays move too in the dark

  with masks and machines and chairs that trot and wail,

  flimsy ragtag things that turn holy and dance

  till no one is audience

  but all grope and stumble in your world.

  When you enter, we feel your presence burn blue,

  no longer a woman, not wiry warm quick flesh

  but a makeshift holy artifact

  moving on the blank face of the dark as on a river:

  ark, artifact, dancer of your own long breaking dance

  which makes itself through you fiercely, totally passing in light

  leaving you thin and darkened as burnt glass.

  I am a light you could read by

  A flame from each finger,

  my hands are candelabra,

  my hair stands in a torch.

  Out of my mouth a long flame hovers.

  Can’t anyone see, handing me a newspaper?

  Can’t anyone see, stamping my book overdue?

  I walk blazing along Sixth Avenue,

  burning gas blue I buy subway tokens,

  a bouquet of coals, I cross the bridge.

  Invisible I singe strangers and pass.

  Now I am on your street.

  How your window flickers.

  I come bringing my burning body

  like an armful of tigerlilies,

  like a votive lantern,

  like a roomful of tassels and leopards and grapes

  for you to come into,

  dance in my burning

  and we will flare up together like stars

  and fall to sleep.

  Crabs

  They are light as flakes of dandruff with scrawny legs.

  Like limpets they cling to the base of each curly hair,

  go lurching among the underbrush for cover.

  Our passions are their weathers.

  Coitus is the Santa Maria hitting on virgin land,

  an immigrant ship coming into harbor,

  free homesteads for all.

  Or native crabs vs. conquistadors wrestle and nip.

  Or maybe they too mingle.

  As the boat glides in, there they are, the native crabs

  with mandolins and bouquets of bougainvillaea

  swaying on the dock singing Aloha.

  For three generations we haven’t seen a new face.

  O the boredom, the stale genes, the incest.

  Or perhaps when the two shores approach

  the crabs line up to leap the gap like monkeys,

  the hair always lusher on the other side.

  They travel as fast as gossip.

  They multiply like troubles.

  They cling and persist through poison and poking and picking,

  dirt and soap, torrents and drought,

  like love
or any other stubborn itch.

  Trajectory of the traveling Susan

  Round Susan, somewhere Susan,

  Susan with suitcase and Berlitz book and stuffed shoulderbag

  flies in the air sitting down.

  Your spices are waiting under the falling dust.

  Strange pussies are sticking their paws under the door.

  Gottlieb sits in a corner with his head loose in his hands

  and plays at poking out his eyes.

  The ceilings are blackboards he has scrawled with hieroglyphics.

  The mailman fills up the box with nothing.

  Quail Susan, pheasant Susan

  riding an aluminum paperclip

  between the cold stars and the jellyfish,

  remember us in the broken net,

  come back to us in the wooly strands of the caring web

  stuck between jammed weeks and waiting testily.

  Each love is singular.

  The strands hang loose.

  Apricot Susan, applesauce Susan

  stuck up in the sky like a painted angel,

  you think the web is a trap.

  You see mouths open to swallow you in pieces.

  You see gaping beaks and hear piercing cries of fill-me.

  Susan, you are a hungry bird too with mouth wide open.

  The nets we build never hold each other.

  The minnow instant darts through the fingers

  leaving a phosphorescent smear

  and nothing else.

  Jagged Susan, enamel Susan,

  Susan of sullen sleeps and jabbing elbows,

  of lists and frenetic starts,

  of the hiss of compressed air and the doors slide shut,

  you can’t hang in the air like a rainbow.

  We are making the revolution out of each other.

  We have no place else to begin

  but with our hungers and our caring and our teeth.

  Each love is singular

  and the community still less than the addition of its parts.

  We are each other’s blocks and bricks.

  To build a house we must first dig a hole

  and try not to fall in.

  The butt of winter

  The city lies grey and sopping like a dead rat

  under the slow oily rain.