Read Circles on the Water Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
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.
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.
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 rainy 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.
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.
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,
smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside
but nobody could take nourishment
for lacking respect.
No husband, no baby, no house, nobody to own you
public as an ashtray you served
waiting for the light that came at last
straight into the windshield on the highway.
Two days later the truckers are pleased.
Your replacement is plain but ten years younger.
Women’s lives are shaped like cheap coffins.
How long will she wait for change?
My hips are a desk.
From my ears hang
chains of paper clips.
Rubber bands form my hair.
My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.
My feet bear casters.
Buzz. Click.
My head is a badly organized file.
My head is a switchboard
where crossed lines crackle.
Press my fingers
and in my eyes appear
credit and debit.
Zing. Tinkle.
My navel is a reject button.
From my mouth issue canceled reams.
Swollen, heavy, rectangular
I am about to be delivered
of a baby
Xerox machine.
File me under W
because I wonce
was
a woman.
Scalded cat,
claws, arched back and blistered pride:
my friend. You’d have cooked down
my ropy carcass in a kettle for soup.
I was honing my knife.
What is friendship
to the desperate?
Is it bigger than a meal?
Before any mirror or man we jostled.
Fought from angst to Zeno,
sucked the onion of suspicion,
poured lie on the telephone.
Always head on: one raw from divorce court
spitting toads and nail clippings,
the other fresh baked from a new final bed
with strawberry-cream-filled brain.
One cooing, while the other spat.
To the hunted
what is loyalty?
Is it deeper than an empty purse?
Wider than a borrowed bed?
Of my two best friends at school
I continued to love the first Marie better
because she died young
so I could carry her along with me,
a wizened embryo.
But you and I clawed at hardscrabble hill
willing to fight anyone
especially each other
to survive.
Couldn’t we have made alliance?
We were each so sure
of the way out,
the way in.
Now they’ve burnt out your nerves, my lungs.
We are better fed
but no better understood,
scabby and gruff with battle.
Bits of our love are filed in dossiers
of the appropriate organizations.
Bits of our love are moldering
in the Lost and Found offices of bankrupt railroads.
Bits stick like broken glass
in the minds of our well-earned enemies.
Regret is a damp wind
off the used car lot
where most of our peers came to rest.
Now—years too late—my voice quavers,
Can I help?
When I was young I believed in intellectual conversation:
I thought the patterns we wove on stale smoke
floated off to the heaven of ideas.
To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse
like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,
suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.
They were talking of integrity and existential ennui
while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions
in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.
Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:
when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,
when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,
they said, she is trying to attract our attention,
she is offering up her breasts and thighs.
I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:
they saw a fish peddler hawking in the street.
Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.
I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.
I try hard to remember to watch what people do.
Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.
Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.
The rest is decoration.
I am an inconvenient woman.
I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.
I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in
or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.
I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.
I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.
I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure
and it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.
I am an inconvenient woman.
You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.
You might trade me in for a yak.
They are faithful and demand only straw.
They make good overcoats.
They never call you up on the telephone.
I love you with my arms and my legs
and my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.
I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.
I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.
I want to read you poems about drowning myself
laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings.
I want you to read my old loverletters.
I want you to want me
as directly and simply and variously
as a cup of hot coffee.
To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.
I carry my love for you
around with me like my teeth
and I am starving.
Opening like a marigold
crop of sun and dry soil
acrid, bright, sturdy.
Spreading its cancer
through the conduits of the body,
a slow damp murder.
Breathing like the sea
glowing with foam and plankton.
Rigid as an iron post
driven between my breasts.
Will you lift your hands
and shape this love
into a thing of goodness?
Will you permit me to live
when you are not looking?
Will you let me ask questions
with my mouth open?
I will not pretend any longer
to be a wind or a mood.
Even with our eyes closed
we are walking on someone’s map.
At the last moment you decided
to take the bus
rather than the plane,
to squander those hours
staring at your reflection
on a dark pane.
Then all night you rummaged
my flesh for some body else.
You pinched and kneaded
testing for ripeness, rot,
suspicious and about to reject me
or knock down the price.
You lectured me like a classroom
on your reading of the week,
used homilies, reconditioned anecdotes,
jokes with rebuilt transmissions.
All the time your eyes veered.
What’s wrong, I would ask?
Nothing, you’d answer, eyes full
of nothing. He goes through women
quickly, a friend said, and now
I see how you pass through,
in a sealed train
leaving a hole like a tunnel.
A man can lie to himself.
A man can lie with his tongue
and his brain and his gesture;
a man can lie with his life.
But the body is simple as a turtle
and straight as a dog:
the body cannot lie.
You want to take your good body off like a glove.
You want to stretch it and shrink it
as you change your abstractions.
You stand in flesh with shame.
You smell your fingers and lick your disgust
and are satisfied.
But the beaten dog of the body remembers.
Blood has ghosts too.
You speak of the collective.
Then you form your decisions
and visit them on others
like an ax. Broken open I have learned
to mistrust a man whose rhetoric is good
and whose ambition is fierce:
a man who says
we
, moving us,
and means
I
and
mine.
Many people have a thing they want to protect.
Sometimes the property is wheat, oil fields, slum housing,
plains on which brown people pick green tomatoes,
stocks in safety deposit boxes, computer patents,
thirty dollars in a shoebox under a mattress.
Maybe it’s a woman they own and her soft invisible labor.
Maybe it’s images from childhood of how things should be.
The revolutionary says, we can let go.
We both used to say that a great deal.
If what we change does not change us
we are playing with blocks.
Always you were dancing before the altar of guilt.
A frowning man with clenched fists
you fixed to my breasts with grappling hooks to feed
gritting your teeth for fear
a good word would slip out:
a man who came back again and again
yet made sure that his coming was attended by pain
and marked by a careful coldness,
as if gentleness were an inventory that could run low,
as if loving were an account that could be overdrawn,
as if tenderness saved drew interest.
You are a capitalist of yourself.
You hoard for fantasies and deceptions
and the slow seep of energy from the loins.
You fondle your fears and coddle them
while you urge others on.
Among your fantasies and abstractions
ranged like favorite battered toys,
you stalk with a new item, gutted
from what was alive and curious.
Now it is safe,
private and tight as a bank vault
or a tomb.