by Marge Piercy
Six hours after I had dropped acid
I began to labor. I was brought to a room with men
and a woman who belonged to the men.
Mosquito fears bothered them.
They held me down till my muscles tore
but I was granted blindness.
The drum of my uterus pounded.
The fist of my womb clenched and unclenched
on me, in the surging cave.
Death crooned under the roar of the waterfall
calling to the child to rest, to stay, to sleep;
calling to the mother to falter, to sink, to fade.
Weeping and screaming I gave birth, I was born.
When I came down
I was handed shame like a cup of sour coffee
for the noise I had made when I had not known them,
when I had been knowing myself.
In the proper ritual we change roles and give assistance.
We bring each other through on that wind.
In the dim tunnels of library stacks
the dream is laid in the spines of books
like the eggs of beetles, in fairy stories,
broken statues and painted vases, mythologies,
legends of queens, old wives’ tales.
The eggs hatch larvae who chew and change.
The dream advances like a wave of purple dye
through the conduits of the blood.
The vision alters dreams till the night is hung
with bold faces painted on shields,
the voices of women like bright scarves on the wind,
the cries of women wet as blood,
women who dance in fire burning and charred
but still dance
together.
I wait for the dream to enter the brain
and turn on the power to connect,
clearing the roads of the instincts.
The fountains will run water and the fruit of the senses
offer its sweetness and knowledge on every stall.
The office workers will go out to the green belt to plant
and the peasants of the belly will also give law.
I wait for the dream to reach the eyes
and shatter the mirror where the moon of the face
eclipses energy’s sun.
I wait for the dream to reach the belly
and make us serious as lean grey wolves
whose shadows race far behind as they hunt.
I wait for the dream to enter the muscles
till we ride our anger like elephants into battle.
We are sleep walkers troubled by nightmare flashes.
In locked wards, we closet our vision, renouncing.
We turn love loud on the radio to shut out cries in the street.
Ours is the sleep of objects given, sold, taken, discarded,
a shuddering sleep whose half remembered dreams
are cast on the neat lawn of the domestic morning,
red blossoms torn by a high wind from a crab apple tree.
Only when we break the mirror and climb into our vision,
only when we are the wind together streaming and singing,
only in the dream we become with our bones for spears,
we are real at last
and wake.
Looking at quilts
Who decided what is useful in its beauty
means less than what has no function besides beauty
(except its weight in money)?
Art without frames: it held parched corn,
it covered the table where soup misted savor,
it covered the bed where the body knit
to self and other and the
dark wool of dreams.
The love of the ordinary blazes out: the backyard
miracle: Ohio Sunflower,
Snail’s Track,
Sweet Gum Leaf,
Moon over the Mountain.
In the pattern Tulip and Peony the sense
of design masters the essence of what sprawled
in the afternoon: called conventionalized
to render out the choice, the graphic wit.
Some have a wistful faded posy yearning:
Star of the Four Winds,
Star of the West,
Queen Charlotte’s Crown.
In a crabbed humor as far from pompous
as a rolling pin, you can trace wrinkles
from smiling under a scorching grasshopper sun:
Monkey Wrench,
The Drunkard’s Path,
Fool’s Puzzle,
Puss in the Corner,
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul,
and the deflating
Hearts and Gizzards.
Pieced quilts, patchwork from best gowns,
winter woolens, linens, blankets, worked jigsaw
of the memories of braided lives, precious
scraps: women were buried but their clothing wore on.
Out of death from childbirth at sixteen, hard
work at forty, out of love for the trumpet vine
and the melon, they issue to us:
Rocky Road to Kansas,
Job’s Troubles,
Crazy Ann,
The Double Irish Chain,
The Tree of Life:
this quilt might be
the only perfect artifact a woman
would ever see, yet she did not doubt
what we had forgotten, that out of her
potatoes and colic, sawdust and blood
she could create; together, alone,
she seized her time and made new.
To the pay toilet
You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her
shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.
She’s supposed to pay for each of them
and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman in a uniform’s on duty
black or whatever the prevailing bottom is
getting thirty cents an hour to make sure
no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door.
Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources
for the greatest good of the smallest number
where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean
and at the end of the row one free toilet
oozes from under its crooked door,
while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies
wait and wait and wait to do
what only the dead find unnecessary.
All clear
Loss is also clearance.
Emptiness is also receptivity.
No, I cannot pretend:
the cells of my body lack you
and keen their specific hunger.
Yet, a light slants over this bleak landscape
from the low yellow sun,
a burning kite caught in the branches.
There is a lightness in me, the absence
of the weight of your judgment
bearing on my nape,
the slow stain of your judgment
rusting the moment.
I go out with empty hands
and women touch me, lightly, while we talk.
The words, the problems, the sharp faces
jostle like winter birds at a feeding station
although the crumpled fields look deserted.
I stroll in the cold gelid morning.
When it becomes clear I am not replacing you
don’t think it is primarily
because you cannot be replaced.
Consider that I am taking pleasure
in space, visited but unoccupied
for every man I have loved
was like an army.
&
nbsp; Unclench yourself
Open, love, open.
I tell you we are able
I tell you we are able
now and then gently
with hands and feet
cold even as fish
to curl into a tangle
and grow a single hide,
slowly to unknit all other skin
and rest in flesh
and rest in flesh entire.
Come all the way in, love,
it is a river
with a strong current
but its brown waters
will not drown you.
Let go.
Do not hold out
your head.
The current knows the bottom
better than your feet can.
You will find
that in this river
we can breathe
we can breathe
and under water see
small gardens and bright fish
too tender
too tender
for the air.
The homely war
1.
Wrote two letters while rain
trickled in lean streaks down my window.
One crowed of friends hiking, steamers, hot pie,
fat with bobwhite, peas planted and rhubarb dug in.
There are facts offered in the hand like ripe raspberries,
common phrases gentle as the caress of trailing hair.
The other malingered in a recitativo of wrongs,
counterpoint of minor and major abuse
quavering on a few tones of No.
A defense after my execution, a sense
that catches on the lip like a chipped glass
of having been used: used like a coin in a slot
or a borrowed towel slung sopping on a chair.
Tanglement that broke raw, in physical threat.
Months later the lies still come back
letters battered and stained, from a false address.
Happiness is simple
a box of sunshine
body against body, closed circuit of response.
Only misery is so complicated.
When another year turns over
compost in the pile
last year’s feast breeding knots of juicy worms,
I do not want to be indicting
new accusations to another exlover
who has thrown off the scarlet cloak of desire to reveal
the same skeletal coldness, the need to control
crouching like an adding machine in his eyes,
the same damp doggy hatred of women,
the eggshell ego and the sandpaper touch,
the boyish murderer spitting mommy on his bayonet.
I am tired of finding my enemy in my bed.
2.
For two years I broke from these cycles, simply.
I thought the death of sex would quiet the air to crystal.
I would see what there was between women and men
besides itch, dependency, habit.
I learned less than I expected.
Judgment sat on my shoulder like a pet crow.
My dreams were skim milk and albumin.
I lacked irrational joy, a lion
lying on my chest purring, the hawk’s talons and cry,
the coarse glory of the daylily that every midsummer morning
raises a new trumpet, that withers with dusk.
My head was severed like a flower in a glass
that would never make seeds.
Like an oak my tap goes deep,
more of me is in the earth than spread into air.
I think best rooted grappling past words.
Better, I thought, for me in my rough being
to force makeshift connections,
patches, encounters, rows,
better to swim in trouble like a muddy river rising
than to become at last all thesis
correct, consistent but hollow
the finished ghost
of my own struggle.
3.
Madeline, in your purity I find myself rebuked.
Madeline, in your clarity I find myself restored.
You are the stream that breaks out
of a living tree; like the peach
you open your blossoms
to the wind that bears frost
a knife in its teeth,
you bloom in a ravaged landscape
black spring
old deaths coming to light
bones and split bellies of hunger,
the remaindered pages of the fall.
You stand and open from bare wood
fertile alone like the peach tree.
Long delicate leaves, slim green moons,
ripple over the sweet fruit
rounding on its stones.
You strike on marble at the core, rock
metamorphosed in pain and pressure,
the texture of agonized flesh.
You are vulnerable as the first buds of the maple
the deer arch their necks to crop.
Delicacy and honesty, unicorn and amazon wrestle
in your high sugar maple forest,
the Vermont hillside you love,
hard wood that drips sweetness you mistrust,
the symmetrical sculpture of each leaf,
the dome of the summer tree
heavy and dense as syrup, as sleep.
You grow deep into your rock, down into the cold
crevices of the fear of first and last things.
The stone of your death you crack and enter
with your lightning brain, with your fingers that ache.
Pain is the familiar whispering in your ear.
I come with my raggedy loves dragging
into the sphere of your clear regard.
I praise our common fight.
I praise friendship embarked on suddenly as a bus that arrives.
I praise friendship maturing like a tall beech tree.
I praise the differences that define us.
I love what I cannot be
as well as what I am.
4.
Seeking from women nurturance, feedback, idea,
my politics, my collective, why then this
open frontier with men? Yet I tell you in the other
I meet the dream exotic as a dragonfly’s eye,
the grenade of a phrase, the joke that would never
leap the gap of the poles of my mind,
the angers struck unexpected
a spade clanging on rock in sand.
Talking without words on the body’s drum:
it is flat, it is woody, it is lean as a shark’s belly,
spiny as a sea urchin, leathery, gross, tulip sleek,
fur of the hare or wool of the sheep,
the toadstool of sex raising its ruddy bald head.
I find you beautiful, I find you funny, I find
you not translatable to words of my blood.
In that meeting I seep
out to the limits where my ego fades
into flesh, into electricity of the muscles thrumming,
into light patterns imploding on the nerves,
into the wet caves where my strength is born again.
I never want to merge: only to overlap,
to grow sensitive in the moment so that we move
together as currents, so that carried
on that wave we sense skin upon skin
nerve into nerve with millions of tiny windows
open to each other’s light as we shine
from the nebulous center like squid
and then let go.
5.
I lack a light touch.
I step on my own words,
a garden rake in the weeds.
I sweat and heave when I should slip away.
I am earnest into sermons when I should shrug.
&
nbsp; I ram on.
The inhabitants of my life change,
tides in a subway car.
At every stop coming and going.
What is constant except a few travelers
in the same direction, and the will to continue
through the loud dark
in the hope of someday arriving?
6.
My old friend, how we sustain
each other, how we bear witness.
We are each other’s light luggage of essentials.
We are each other’s film archive and museum
packed in the crumbling arch of the skull.
Trust is the slowest strength, growing
microscopic ring on ring of living wood.
The greater gift is caring,
the laying on of hands in the dark,
of words in the light.
The lesser gift is remembering,
the compass in the bush that makes clear the way
come, the way to go.
We have shaped each other.
My new friend, every beginning throws the scent
of a sunny morning in a pine grove after rain.
The senses stretch out the necks of giraffes
for the smallest leaf of data to understand.
We give with the doors wide open;
a gardener with too many tomatoes,
we count nothing, we fill bushels with joy.
When does the tallying start?
Slowly underground fears begin, invisible
as the mycelium of a toadstool
waiting only for a damp morning to sprout.
I ask you to give much, to give up more.
What comes easy to a man comes
out of women. Nothing will be easy here.
Good will starts out fat and sweet
as tub butter and turns slowly rancid.
It must be made again daily
if we want it fresh.
The waters of trust run as deep as the river of fear
through the dark caverns in the bone.
Work is my center, my trunk
yet we are rooted in loving connection
with a deep grasping and full green giving.
7.
I am sick, sick to desperation
of the old defeats, of the broken treaties,
episodes of the same colonial war of women and men.