Read Circles on the Water Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
We drink the water of this hill
and give our garbage to its soil.
We haul thatch for it and seaweed.
Out of it rise supper and roses
for the bedroom and herbs
for your next cold.
Your flesh grows out of this hill
like the maple trees. Its sweetness
is baked by this sun. Your eyes
have taken in sea and the light leaves
of the locust and the dark bristles
of the pine.
When we work in the garden you say
that now it feels sexual, the plants
pushing through us, the shivering
of the leaves. As we make love
later the oaks bend over us,
the hill listens.
The cats come and sit on the foot
of the bed to watch us.
Afterwards they purr.
The tomatoes grow faster and the beans.
You are learning to live in circles
as well as straight lines.
I am the woman who sits by the river
river of tears
river of sewage
river of rainbows.
I sit by the river and count the corpses
floating by from the war upstream.
I sit by the river and watch the water
dwindle and the banks poke out like sore gums.
I watch the water change from green to shit brown.
I sit by the river and fish for your soul.
I want to lick it clean.
I want to turn it into a butterfly
that will weave drunkenly from orchid to rose.
I want to turn it into a pumpkin.
I want it to turn itself into a human being.
Oh, close your eyes tight and push hard
and evolve, altogether now. We can
do it if we try. Concentrate
and hold hands and push.
You can take your world back
if you want to. It’s an araucana
egg, all blue and green
swaddled in filmy clouds.
Don’t let them cook and gobble it,
azure and jungle green egg laid
by the extinct phoenix of the universe.
Send me your worn hacks of tired themes, your dying horses of liberation,
your poor bony mules of freedom now.
I am the woman sitting by the river.
I mend old rebellions and patch them new.
Now the river turns from shit brown to bubbling blood
as an arm dressed in a uniform
floats by like an idling log.
Up too high to see, bombers big as bowling alleys
streak over and the automated battlefield
lights up like a Star Wars pinball machine.
I am the old woman sitting by the river scolding corpses.
I want to stare into the river and see the bottom
glinting like clean hair.
I want to outlive my usefulness
and sing water songs, songs
in praise of the green brown river
flowing clean through the blue green world.
The following is a list of the poems in this book and the dates they were written, which, as you can see, often is different from the date of the book publication.
Kneeling at the pipes 1965
Visiting a dead man on a summer day 1966
Girl in white 1963
Noon of the sunbather 1961
A valley where I don’t belong 1961
S. dead 1965
Hallow eve with spaces for ghosts 1965
Landed fish 1966
A few ashes for Sunday morning 1961
Concerning the mathematician 1966
Postcard from the garden 1964
The cats of Greece 1964
Sign 1967
A married walk in a hot place 1964
The Peaceable Kingdom 1966
Gasman invites the skyscrapers to dance 1967
The skyscrapers of the financial district dance with Gasman 1967
Breaking camp 1966, revised 1981
Walking into love 1968
Community 1967
The neighbor 1966
The friend 1967
The morning half-life blues began 1952, finished 1967
Erasure 1967
The cyclist 1966
Juan’s twilight dance 1967
Learning experience 1966
Half past home began 1960, finished 1968
Simple-song 1967
For Jeriann’s hands 1967
I am a light you could read by 1967
Crabs 1968
Trajectory of the traveling Susan 1968
The butt of winter 1968
Bronchitis on the 14th floor 1968
The death of the small commune 1969
The track of the master builder (published in
Hard Loving
as “Homo faber” 1967, rewritten 1981 for this vol.)
Why the soup tastes like the
Daily News
1967
Curse of the earth magician on a metal land 1967
Letter to be disguised as a gas bill 1965
Sojourners 1966
Under the grind 1967
Somehow 1968
Never-never 1969
Ache’s end 1969
A work of artiface 1970
What you waited for 1971
The secretary chant 1968
Night letter 1968
In the men’s room(s) 1972
The nuisance 1968
I will not be your sickness 1968
The thrifty lover 1971
A shadow play for guilt 1969
Song of the fucked duck 1969
A just anger 1971
The crippling 1969
Right thinking man 1971
Barbie doll 1970
Hello up there 1972
High frequency 1973
The woman in the ordinary 1970
Unlearning to not speak 1971
Women’s laughter 1972
Burying blues for Janis 1970
The best defense is offensive began 1960, finished 1971
Icon began 1960, finished 1972
Some collisions bring luck 1967
We become new 1971
Meetings like hungry beaks 1972
To be of use 1973
Bridging 1971
Doing it differently 1972
The spring offensive of the snail 1972
Councils 1971
Laying Down the Tower 1971–72
Living in the open 1974
I awoke with the room cold 1970
Gracious goodness 1971
Homesick 1973
Seedlings in the mail 1972
The daily life of the worker bee 1974
Cod summer 1972
A proposal for recycling wastes 1974
The bumpity road to mutual devotion 1974
On Castle Hill 1973
From
Sand Roads
1975
Rough times 1972
Phyllis wounded 1975
Rape poem 1974
The consumer 1969
The provocation of the dream 1975
Looking at quilts 1974
To the pay toilet 1973
All clear 1972
Unclench yourself 1968
The homely war 1975
The twelve-spoked wheel flashing 1976
What the owl sees 1975
The Greater Grand Rapids lover 1975
The Lansing bad penny come again blues 1975
The poet dreams of a nice warm motel 1976
Skimpy day at the solstice 1974
The market economy 1977
The love of lettuce 1977
Martha as the angel Gabriel 1976
Snow in May 1976
The window of the woman burning 1975
Going in 1975
Athena in the front lines 1962–75
The root canal 1976
Doors in the wind and the water 1976
You ask why sometimes I say stop 1977
Smalley Bar 1977
For Shoshana Rihn—Pat Swinton 1975
In the wet 1977
Crows 1975
If they come in the night 1977
At the core 1975
Beauty I would suffer for 1976
A gift of light 1977
The inside chance 1979
Night flight 1978
Excursions, incursions 1978
Apologies 1968
The long death 1979
The cast off 1977
Rainy 4th 1979
Attack of the squash people 1978
Intruding 1978
September afternoon at four o’clock 1978
Morning athletes 1977
Cats like angels 1978
For strong women 1977
For the young who want to 1979
Hand games 1979
Right to life 1979
Shadows of the burning 1979
The sabbath of mutual respect 1979
The perpetual migration 1978
The longest night 1979
Crescent moon like a canoe 1978
It breaks 1979
What’s that smell in the kitchen? 1980
Wind is the wall of the year 1980
Laocoön is the name of the figure 1979
Snow, snow 1981
Digging in 1981
Let us gather at the river 1980
Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including
Circles on the Water
, a selection from her early works. Among her more recent volumes:
The Crooked Inheritance
;
Colors Passing Through Us
;
The Art of Blessing the Day
;
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
;
Mars and Her Children
;
Available Light
;
My Mother’s Body
; and
Stone, Paper, Knife.
In 1990 her poetry won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She is also the author of a memoir,
Sleeping with Cats
, and seventeen novels, the most recent being
Sex Wars.
Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leap Frog Press, with whom she has written a play, a novel, and most recently the second edition of
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Fiction and Personal Narrative.
Marge Piercy’s website address is
www.margepiercy.com
.