Read Circles on the Water Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
Circles on the Water (10 page)
We are equal if we make ourselves so, every day, every night
constantly renewing what the street destroys.
We are equal only if you open too on your heavy hinges
and let your love come freely, freely, where it will never be safe,
where you can never possess.
When we mesh badly, with scraping and squeaking,
remember that every son had a mother
whose beloved son he was,
and every woman had a mother
whose beloved son she wasn’t.
What feels natural and easy is soft murder
of each other and that mutant future
striving to break into bloom
bloody and red as the real rose.
Periodic, earthy, of a violent tenderness
it is the nature of this joining
to remain partial and episodic
yet feel total: a mountain that opens like a door
and then closes
like a mountain.
Living someplace else is wrong
in Jerusalem the golden
floating over New England smog,
above paper company forests,
deserted brick textile mills
square brooders on the rotten rivers,
developer-chewed mountains.
Living out of time is wrong.
The future drained us thin as paper.
We were tools scraping.
After the revolution
we would be good, love one another
and bake fruitcakes.
In the meantime eat your ulcer.
Living upside down is wrong,
roots in the air
mouths filled with sand.
Only what might be sang.
I cannot live crackling
with electric rage always.
The journey is too long
to run, cursing those
who can’t keep up.
Give me your hand.
Talk quietly to everyone you meet.
It is going on.
We are moving again
with our houses on our backs.
This time we have to remember
to sing and make soup.
Pack the
Kapital
and the vitamin E,
the basil plant for the sill,
Apache tears you
picked up in the desert.
But remember to bury
all old quarrels
behind the garage for compost.
Forgive who insulted you.
Forgive yourself for being wrong.
You will do it again
for nothing living
resembles a straight line,
certainly not this journey
to and fro, zigzagging
you there and me here
making our own road onward
as the snail does.
Yes, for some time we might contemplate
not the tiger, not the eagle or grizzly
but the snail who always remembers
that wherever you find yourself eating
is home, the center
where you must make your love,
and wherever you wake up
is here, the right place to be
where we start again.
(for two voices, female and male)
 | We must sit down and reason together. We must sit down. Men standing want to hold forth. They rain down upon faces lifted. |
 | We must sit down on the floor on the earth on stones and mats and blankets. There must be no front to the speaking no platform, no rostrum, no stage or table. We will not crane to see who is speaking. |
 | Perhaps we should sit in the dark. In the dark we could utter our feelings. In the dark we could propose and describe and suggest. |
| In the dark we could not see who speaks and only the words would say what they say. |
| Thus saying what we feel and what we want, what we fear for ourselves and each other into the dark, perhaps we could begin to begin to listen. |
| Perhaps we should talk in groups small enough for everyone to speak. |
| Perhaps we should start by speaking softly. The women must learn to dare to speak. |
| The men must bother to listen. |
| The women must learn to say, I think this is so. |
| The men must learn to stop dancing solos on the ceiling. After each speaks, she or he will repeat a ritual phrase: |
 | It is not I who speaks but the wind. Wind blows through me. Long after me, is the wind. |