Poem of the Day

I haven’t posted one from Marge Piercy in a while. I’m still evaluating wedding poems and found this one through the Poetry Foundation.

Colors passing through us
By Marge Piercy

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.

Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.

Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

My uncle’s mother passed away last week. She was (great-great, great-) grandmother by blood to many, but also grandmother to so many others as well. She and her husband were great friends of my grandparents (and all four were delighted when my aunt and uncle married, over 50 years ago). She was full of joy and love and the world was lucky to have her for the last 90+ years.

That doesn’t really have a lot to do with this poem, other than that someone dear to me has passed. This one’s been in my file for a while and every time I read it, I feel like my heart has been ripped out. (My kind of poem!)

When a friend dies
By Marge Piercy

When a friend dies
the salmon run no fatter.
The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.
Nothing is won by endurance
but endurance.
A hunger sucks at the mind
for gone color after the last bronze
chrysanthemum is withered by frost.
A hunger drains the day,
a homely sore gap
after a tooth is pulled,
a red giant gone nova,
an empty place in the sky
sliding down the arch
after Orion in night as wide
as a sleepless staring eye.
When pain and fatigue wrestle
fatigue wins. The eye shuts.
Then the pain rises again at dawn.
At first you can stare at it,
Then it blinds you.

Here’s one shared by my poetry buddy. I’m sorry to say that the PotD will be on hiatus until the last week in April because I will be on vacation in England. The last time I went I posted a U.K. edition, but I just don’t want to have to worry about having internet access while traipsing about the English countryside. (hee hee) There are plenty of goodies in the archives if you miss your daily dose of poems!

Implications of One Plus One
By Marge Piercy

Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.

Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed’s
airy silk, wingtip’s feathery caresses,
our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering
like fog over warm water, thickening to rain.

Sometimes we go to it heartily, digging,
burrowing, grunting, tossing up covers
like loose earth, nosing into the other’s
flesh with hot nozzles and wallowing there.

Sometimes we are kids making out, silly
in the quilt, tickling the xylophone spine,
blowing wet jokes, loud as a whole
slumber party bouncing till the bed breaks.

I go round and round you sometimes, scouting,
blundering, seeking a way in, the high boxwood
maze I penetrate running lungs bursting
toward the fountain of green fire at the heart.

Sometimes you open wide as cathedral doors
and yank me inside. Sometimes you slither
into me like a snake into its burrow.
Sometimes you march in with a brass band.

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.
It is more and less than love: timing,
chemistry, magic and will and luck.

One plus one equal one, unknowable except
in the moment, not convertible into words,
not explicable or philosophically interesting.
But it is. And it is. And it is. Amen.

Current Tea: honey vanilla chamomile

I think I got this from a poetry buddy, though I have read a volume or two of Marge Piercy’s.

To Have Without Holding
By Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

I still seem to have a few Marge Piercy poems in my file (because she’s awesome). None of them are particularly happy, but don’t let that make you think I’m this depressed at the moment. I wonder if she intended this as a wake-up call. I believe many of her points are valid, but I’m not against nuclear power on principle. It’s like anything else with dangerous effects; it has to be done with appropriate precautions. It’s really a tragedy that there have been so many botched attempts. I’ve always wondered how Marie Curie must have felt to die from the effects of her research, especially after she did so much for humanity. So much was unknown then, but there’s no excuse now.

The long death
By Marge Piercy

for Wendy Teresa Simon (September 25, 1954 – August 7, 1979)

Radiation is like oppression,
the average daily kind of subliminal toothache
you get almost used to, the stench
of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.

We comprehend the disasters of the moment,
the nursing home fire, the river in flood
pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane
crash with fragments of burnt bodies
scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,
the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.

But how to grasp a thing that does not
kill you today or tomorrow
but slowly from the inside in twenty years.
How to feel that a corporate or governmental
choice means we bear twisted genes and our
grandchildren will be stillborn if our
children are very lucky.

Slow death can not be photographed for the six
o’clock news. It’s all statistical,
the gross national product or the prime
lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw
in the right spectrum, how it would shine,
lurid as magenta neon.

If we could smell radiation like seeping
gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we
could hear it as a low ominous roar
of the earth shifting, then we would not sit
and be poisoned while industry spokesmen
talk of acceptable millirems and .02
cancer per population thousand.

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,
murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,
from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,
and fourteen years later statistics are printed
on the rise in leukemia among children.
We never see their faces. They never stand,
those poisoned children together in a courtyard,
and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.

The shipyard workers who built nuclear
submarines, the soldiers who were marched
into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-
bomb, the people who work in power plants,
they die quietly years after in hospital
wards and not on the evening news.

The soft spring rain floats down and the air
is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings
drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,
you run in it and feel clean and strong,
the spring rain blowing from the irradiated
cloud over the power plant.

Radiation is oppression, the daily average
kind, the kind you’re almost used to
and live with as the years abrade you,
high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,
a hacking cough: you take it inside
and it becomes pain and you say, not
They are killing me, but I am sick now.

We’ve been seeing quite a bit of wildlife (goldfinches, juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, a hawk, and two deer) around here today, so I thought I’d post this one, which I’ve had in my file for a while. It’s from Piercy’s collection The Moon Is Always Female.

The perpetual migration
By Marge Piercy

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 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 the inner constellation matches the 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.

Let’s hope this marks my return to consistency with the PotD. Thanks to everyone who has suggested poems. Look for them in the days to come. I’ve been saving this poem and it’s quite appropriate for this time of year, I think. I’ve been cooking/baking lots of delicacies containing squash!

Look what my cousin brought when she and her husband came for dinner. She claimed they were “awash in squash”. Then my mom brought another huge zucchini and a yellow squash.

Attack of the squash people
By Marge Piercy

And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.

They’re coming, they’re on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped with cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.

Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.

Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people’s gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.

With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.

I still have quite a few of Marge Piercy’s poems in my file, and I haven’t posted one of hers in a while. So today’s choice was easy.

Arriving
By Marge Piercy

People often labor to attain
what turns out to be an entrance
to a small closet
or a deep pit
or sorrow like a toothache of the brain.

I wanted you. I fought you
for yourself, I wrestled
to open you, I hung on.
I sat on my love as on the lid
of a chest holding a hungry bear.
You were what I wanted: you
still are. Now my wanting
feeds on success and grows,
a cowbird chick in a warbler’s
nest, bigger by the hour, bolder
and louder, screeching and gaping
for more, flapping bald wings.

I am ungainly in love as a house
dancing. I am a factory chimney
that has learned to play Bach
like a carillon. I belch rusty
smoke and flames and strange music.
I am a locomotive that wants
to fly to the moon.

I should wear black
on black like a Greek village woman,
making signs against the evil eye
and powder my head white. Though I try
to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire
on a mountain, and tomorrow
and the next day make me shudder
equally with hope and fear.

Now that I live in the country with a large yard and lots of plants, I’m more aware of things like spiders, of which I’ve never been fond. Yesterday there was one crawling on the bunch of lilacs on my dining room table, and I didn’t even kill it. (Big step for me, as one of my greatest fears is waking up with something crawling on me.)

Argiope
By Marge Piercy

Your web spans a distance
of two of my hands spread
turning the space between unrelated
uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn
stalks into a frame. The patterned web
startles me, as if a grasshopper
spoke, as if a moth whispered.
The bold design cannot have
a predatory use: no fly,
no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag
as my gaze is. Thin I see you,
big, much bigger than I feel
spiders ought to be. Black and gold
you are a shiny brooch with legs
of derricks. I remind you
I am a general friend to your
kind. I rescue your kinfolk
from the bathtub fall mornings
before I run the water. I
remind you nervously we are
artisans, we both make out
of what we take in and what
we pass through our guts a patterned
object slung on the world.
I detour your net carefully
picking my way through the
pumpkin vines. The mother
of nightmares fatal and hungry,
you kill for a living. Beauty
is only a sideline, and your mate
approaches you with infinite
caution or you eat him too.
You stare at me, you do not
scuttle or hide, you wait.
I go round and leave you mistress
of your territory, not in
kindness but in awe. Stay
out of my dreams, Hecate
of the garden patch, Argiope.

I still have quite a few of Marge Piercy’s poems in my file…

Waiting outside
By Marge Piercy

All day you have been on my mind,
a seagull perched on an old wharf
piling by the steely grip of its claws,
shrieking when any other comes too near,
waiting for fish or what the tide brings,
shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

All day you have been on my mind,
a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit
with a perky veil scratching my cheek,
with a feather hanging down like a broken
tail tickling my neck, settling its
big dome over my ears muffling sounds.

All day you have been on my mind,
a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,
wind off the Sahara bearing bad
news and sand that stifles, roaring
through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,
a helmet that clamps me here to bake.

All day you have been on my mind,
a steam iron pressing the convolutions
from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying
cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable
with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow
furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

Here’s another one from Piercy. I love her descriptions in this poem and I was astounded when I got to the end and realized how incredibly true her observation was. This poem was also in The Moon is Always Female.

The doughty oaks
By Marge Piercy

Oaks don’t drop their leaves
as elms and lindens do.
They evolved no corky layer,
no special tricks.
They shut off the water.
Leaves hang on withering
tougher than leather.
Wind tears them loose.

Slowly they grow, white oaks
under the pitch pines,
tap roots plunging
deep, enormous carrots.
By the marsh they turn
twisting, writhing
aging into lichens, contorted
like the wind solidified.

In the spring how stubborn
how cautious
clutching their wallets tight.
Long after the maples,
the beeches have leafed out
they sleep in their ragged leaves.
Reluctantly in the buzz and hum
they raise velvet
antlers flushed red,
then flash silvery tassels.
At last vaulted
green chambers of summer.

Ponderous, when mature, as elephants,
in the storm they slam castle doors.
They all prepare to be great
grandfathers, in the meantime
dealing in cup and saucer acorns.

When frost crispens the morning,
they give up nothing willingly.
Always fighting the season,
conservative, mulish.
I find it easy to admire in trees
what depresses me in people.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

I’m reading The Moon is Always Female by Marge Piercy and it’s wonderful. Here’s a sample. (I’m hording up a number of other poems to post in the future, too.)

Intimacy
By Marge Piercy

Why does my life so often
feel like a slither of entrails
pouring from a would in my belly?
With both my hands I grasp
my wet guts, trying to force
them back in.
                      Why does my life
so often feel like a wild
black lake under the midnight
thunder where I am drowning,
waves crashing over my face
as I try to breathe.
                               Why
does my life feel like a war
I am fighting alone? Why are
you fighting me? Why aren’t
you with me? If I die this instant
will you be more content
with the morning news?
Will your coffee taste better?
I am not your fate. I am not your government.
I am not your FBI. I am not
even your mother, not your father
or your nightmare or your health.
I am not a fence, not a wall.
I am not the law or the actuarial tables
of your insurance broker. I am
a woman with my guts loose
in my hands, howling and it is not
because I committed hara-kiri.
I suggest either you cook me
or sew me back up. I suggest you walk
into my pain as into the breaking
waves of an ocean of blood, and either
we will both drown or we will
climb out together and walk away.

Here’s another selection from Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems.

To be of use
By Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.