by Marge Piercy
Between the lower east side tenements
the sky is a snotty handkerchief.
The garbage of poor living slimes the streets.
You lie on your bed and think
soon it will be hot and violent,
then it will be cold and mean.
You say you feel as empty
as a popbottle in the street.
You say you feel full of cold water
standing like an old horse trough.
The clock ticks, somewhat wrong,
the walls crack their dry knuckles.
Work is only other rooms where people cough,
only the typewriter clucking like a wrong clock.
Nobody will turn the soiled water into wine,
nobody will shout cold Lazarus alive
but you. You are your own magician.
Stretch out your hand,
stretch out your hand and look:
each finger is a snake of energy,
a gaggle of craning necks.
Each electric finger conducts the world.
Each finger is a bud’s eye opening.
Each finger is a vulnerable weapon.
The sun is floating in your belly like a fish.
Light creaks in your bones.
You are sleeping with your tail in your mouth.
Unclench your hands and look.
Nothing is given us but each other.
We have nothing to give
but ourselves.
We have nothing to take but the time
that drips, drips anyhow
leaving a brown stain.
Open your eyes and your belly.
Let the sun rise into your chest and burn your throat,
stretch out your hands and tear the gauzy rain
that your world can be born from you
screaming and red.
Bronchitis on the 14th floor
The air swarms with piranhas
disguised as snow.
In the red chair my cat
licks her buttery paw.
The pear of my fever has ripened.
My clogged lungs percolate
as I simmer in sweet fat
above the flickering city.
The shocked limb of Broadway
jerks spasmodically below.
Knives flutter into ribs;
cars collapse into accordions.
My lungs shine, two lanterns.
I love the men who stand
at the foot of my bed,
whose voices tumble like bears
over the ceiling, whose hands
smell of tangerines and medicine.
Through nights of fire and grit
streaked with falling claws
they draw me golden with fever
borne safely, swiftly forward
on the galloping sleigh of my bed.
The death of the small commune
The death of the small commune
is almost accomplished.
I find it hard now to believe
in connection beyond the couple,
hard as broken bone.
Time for withdrawal and healing.
Time for lonely work
spun out of the torn gut.
Time for touching turned up earth,
for trickling seed from the palm,
thinning the shoots of green herb.
What we wanted to build
was a way station for journeying
to a new world,
but we could not agree long enough
to build the second wall,
could not love long enough
to move the heavy stone on stone,
not listen with patience
to make a good plan,
we could not agree.
Nothing remains but a shallow hole,
nothing remains
but a hole
in everything.
The track of the master builder
Pyramids of flesh sweated pyramids of stone
as slaves chiseled their stolen lives in rock
over the gilded chrysalis of dead royal grub.
The Romans built roads for marching armies
hacked like swords straight to the horizon.
Gothic cathedrals: a heaven of winter clouds
crystallizing as they rained into stone caves,
choirs of polyphonic light striking chilly slabs
where nobles with swords on and skinny saints
lay under the floor.
Fortresses, dungeons, keeps,
moats and bulwarks. Palaces with mirrored halls;
rooms whose views unfold into each other
like formal gardens, offer vistas and symmetry.
Skyscrapers where nobody lives filled with paper.
Where do the people live and what have they made themselves
splendid as these towers of glass, these groves of stone?
The impulse that in 1910 cast banks as temples,
where now does it build its numinous artifact?
The ziggurat, the acropolis, the palace of our dream
whose shape rings in the blood’s cave like belladonna,
take form in the eagle’s preyseeking soar
of the bomber, those planes expensive as cities,
the shark lean submarines of nuclear death,
the taut kinetic tower of the missile,
the dark fiery omphalos of the all-killing bomb.
Why the soup tastes like the Daily News
The great dream stinks like a whale gone aground.
Somewhere in New York Harbor
in the lee of the iron maiden
it died of pollution
and was cast up on Cape Cod by the Racepoint Light.
The vast blubber is rotting.
Scales of fat ripple on the waters
until the taste of that decay
like a sulphurous factory of chemical plenty
dyes every tongue.
Curse of the earth magician on a metal land
Marching, a dream of wind in our chests,
a dream of thunder in our legs,
we tied up midtown Manhattan for half an hour,
the Revolutionary Contingent and Harlem,
but it did not happen
because it was not reported in any newspaper.
The riot squad was waiting at the bottom of 42nd Street
to disperse us into uncertain memory.
A buffalo said to me
I used to crop and ruminate on LaSalle Street in Chicago.
The grasses were sweet under the black tower of the Board of Trade.
Now I stand in the zoo next to the yaks.
Let the ghosts of those recently starved rise
and like piranhas in ten seconds flat chew down to public bones
the generals and the experts on antipersonnel weapons
and the senators and the oil men and the lobbyists
and the sleek smiling sharks who dance at the Diamond Ball.
I am the earth magician about to disappear into the ground.
This is butterfly’s war song about to darken into the fire.
Put the eagle to sleep.
I see from the afternoon papers
that we have bought another country
and are cutting the natives down to built jet airstrips.
A common motif of monuments in the United States
is an eagle with wings spread, beak open
and the globe grasped in his claws.
Put the eagle to sleep.
This is butterfly’s war song addressed to the Congress of Sharks.
You eat bunches of small farmers like radishes for breakfast.
You are rotting our teeth with sugar
refined from the skulls of Caribbean children. Thus far
we have only the power of earth magicians, dream and song and marching,
to dance the eagle to sleep.
We are about
to disappear into the fire.
There is only time for a brief curse by a chorus of ghosts
of Indians murdered with smallpox and repeating rifles on the plains,
of Indians shot by the marines in Santo Domingo,
napalmed in the mountains of Guatemala last week.
There will be no more spring.
Your corn will sprout in rows and the leaves will lengthen
but there will be no spring running clean water through the bones,
no soft wind full of bees, no long prairie wind bearing feathers of geese.
It will be cold or hot. It will step on your necks.
A pool of oil will hang over your cities,
oil slick will scum your lakes and streams killing the trout and the ducklings,
concrete and plastic will seal the black earth and the red earth,
your rivers hum with radioactivity and the salmon float belly up,
and your mountains be hollowed out to hold the files of great corporations,
and shale oil sucked from under the Rockies till the continent buckles.
Look! children of the shark and the eagle
you have no more spring. You do not mind.
You turn on the sunlamp and the airconditioning
and sit at the television watching the soldiers dance.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
From 4-TELLING
Letter to be disguised as a gas bill
Your face scrapes my sleep tonight
sharp as a broken girder.
My hands are empty shoppingbags.
Never plastered on the walls of subway night
in garish snake-lettered posters of defeat.
I was always stomping on your toes eager to stick
clippings that should have interested you into the soup.
I told and retold stories weeping mascara on your shirt.
If I introduced a girl she would sink fangs in your shin
or hang in the closet for months, a sleazy kimono.
I brought you my goathaired prickheavy men to bless
while they glowered on your chairs turning green as Swiss hats.
I asked your advice and worse, took it.
I was always hauling out the dollar watch of my pride.
Time after time you toted me home in a wheelbarrow drunk
with words sudsing, dress rumpled and randomly amorous
teasing you like an uncle made of poles to hold clotheslines up.
With my father you constantly wished I had been born
a boy or a rowboat or a nice wooden chest of drawers.
In the morning you delivered clanking chronicles of my faults.
Now you are respectable in Poughkeepsie.
Every couple of years I call you up
and your voice thickens with resentment and shame.
It is all done, it is quiet and still,
a piece of old cheese too hard to chew.
I list my own faults now ledger upon ledger
yet it’s you I cannot forgive who have given me up.
Are you comfortable in Poughkeepsie with Vassar and IBM?
Do you stoke up your memory on cold mornings?
My rector, I make no more apologies,
I say my dirt and chaos are more loving
than your cleanliness and I exile no one,
this smelly hunting dog you sent to the vet’s
to be put away, baby, put to sleep with all her fleas.
You murdered me out of your life.
I do not forgive, I hate it, I am not resigned.
I will howl at every hydrant for thirty years.
Sojourners
The rabbit who used to belong to Matthew
of the Parks Department now lives with Joanne,
She keeps him in an orange crate
for shitting raisins in shoes,
on bathmats, under pianos and in beds.
He is white, fat and runs like a faucet;
freed, would scuffle in closetbottoms
and with a rug for footing
do jigs, his red idiot eyes flashing.
In the crate he sulks.
His sinewy bent legs are stiff.
I am sorry for animals who scrounge their living from people
whether scavenging among ashcans and busted tenths
or tricksy and warm in kitchens:
it is hard enough for people to stand people
hard and sharp as the teeth of a saw
and at least we fuck each other.
Under the grind
Responsibilities roost on our fingers and toes
clucking and blinking.
Yes, they shall get their daily corn
the minutes of our lives scattered.
The love which I bear to you
must be scrubbed and washed and beaten on the rocks.
We will clean it
until it smells like yellow soap.
We will scrub it
until it is thin and scratchy as an old man’s beard.
You are turning yourself into the Sensible Machine.
The beads of old problems rattle in your spine.
You are congealing your anger
into a hard green stone you suck and suck,
beautiful as a tiger’s eye and poisonous.
You are becoming gnarled.
You are twisting like an old root inside yourself.
You will embrace nothing but paper and spines.
If you open to me, you are afraid
all your anxieties will burst free
like crows flying out of a broken safe.
Where would they fly? on whose head perch?
How would you catch them again?
No, I must keep still and mind business.
I must turn into a clock on a stick.
Look, my arms are already rough with bark.
Somehow
We need a private bush
to sprout in the clash of traffic
and deep in its thicket
we will root together.
There is a jacket on the wall.
We will leap into the pocket.
In that fuzzy hollow
our hairs will knot.
Behold the pencil sharpener
on the filing cabinet.
We will crawl through the hole,
we will bed upon shavings.
Zeus came to Danaë
in a golden shower.
I shall very carefully
wash my legs and ears.
In the form of a memorandum
you will get through.
All we need is a closet.
All we need is a big box.
All we need is a purse-
sized bed.
Never-never
Missing is a pain
in everyplace
making a toothache
out of a day.
But to miss something
that never was:
the longest guilt
the regret that comes down
like a fine ash
year after year
is the shadow of what
we did not dare.
All the days that go out
like neglected cigarettes,
the days that dribble away.
How often does love strike?
We turn into ghosts
loitering outside doorways
we imagined entering.
In the lovers’ room
the floor creaks,
dust sifts from the ceiling,
the golden bed has been hauled away
by the dealer
in unused dreams.
Ache’s end
My sweet ache
is gone.
Sweet and painful
caramel, honey
in a broken tooth.
You were with me
like a light cold
in the bones,
a rain
y day gnawing.
An awareness
that would turn down
to a faint hum
to an edging of static.
This caring
colored my life,
a wine badly fermented
with sugar and vinegar
in suspension.
A body can grow used
to a weight,
used to limping
and find it hard
to learn again
to walk straight.
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
From TO BE OF USE
A work of artifice
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
What you waited for
You called yourself a dishwater blond,
body warm and flat as beer that’s been standing.
You always had to stand until your feet were sore
behind the counter
with a smile like an outsized safety pin
holding your lips off your buck teeth.
Most nights alone or alone with men
who wiped themselves in you.
Pass the damp rag over the counter again.
Tourist cabins and roadhouses of the deaf loudmouth,
ponds where old boots swim and drive-in moons.
You came to see yourself as a salesman’s bad joke.
What did you ever receive for free
except a fetus you had to pay to yank out.
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,