Read Circles on the Water Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
In using there are always two.
The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.
There are lies that glow so brightly we consent
to give a finger and then an arm
to let them burn.
I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.
Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide
reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto
and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward
down is where my head is, next to my feet.
Form follows function, says the organizer
and turns himself into a paper clip,
into a vacuum cleaner,
into a machine gun.
Function follows analysis
but the forebrain
is only an owl in the tree of self.
One third of life we prowl in the grottoes of sleep
where neglected worms ripen into dragons,
where the spoiled pencil swells into an oak,
and the cows of our early sins are called home chewing their cuds
and turning the sad faces of our childhood upon us.
Come back and scrub the floor, the stain is still there,
come back with your brush and kneel down,
scrub and scrub again, it will never be clean.
Buried desires sprout like mushrooms on the chin of the morning.
The will to be totally rational
is the will to be made out of glass and steel:
and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
The cockroach knows as much as you about living.
We trust with our hands and our mouths.
The cunt accepts. The teeth and back reject.
What we have to give each other:
dumb and mysterious as water swirling.
Always in the long corridors of the psyche
doors are opening and doors are slamming shut.
We rise each day to give birth or to murder
selves that go through our hands like tiny fish.
You said: I am the organizer and took and used.
You wrapped your head in theory like yards of gauze
and touched others only as tools that fit to your task.
Arrogance is not a revolutionary virtue.
The mad bulldozers of ego level the ground.
I was a tool that screamed in the hand.
I have been loving you so long and hard and mean
and the taste of you is part of my tongue
and your face is burnt into my eyelids
and I could build you with my fingers out of dust.
Now it is over. Whether we want or not
our roots go down to strange waters,
we are creatures of the seasons and the earth.
You always had a reason and you have them still
rattling like dry leaves on a stunted tree.
Anger shines through me.
Anger shines through me.
I am a burning bush.
My rage is a cloud of flame.
My rage is a cloud of flame
in which I walk
seeking justice
like a precipice.
How the streets
of the iron city
flicker, flicker,
and the dirty air
fumes.
Anger storms
between me and things,
transfiguring,
transfiguring.
A good anger acted upon
is beautiful as lightning
and swift with power.
A good anger swallowed,
a good anger swallowed
clots the blood
to slime.
I used to watch it on the ledge:
a crippled bird.
How did it survive?
Surely it would die soon.
Then I saw a man
at one of the windows
fed it, a few seeds,
a crust from lunch.
Often he forgot
and it went hopping on the ledge
a starving
scurvy sparrow.
Every couple of weeks
he caught it in his hand
and clipped back one wing.
I call it a sparrow.
The plumage was sooty,
sometimes in the sun
scarlet as a tanager.
He never let it fly.
He never took it in.
Perhaps he was starving too.
Perhaps he counted every crumb.
Perhaps he hated
that anything alive
knew how to fly.
The head: egg of all.
He thinks of himself as a head thinking.
He is eating a coddled egg.
He drops a few choice phrases on his wife
who cannot seem to learn after twenty years
the perfection of egg protein
neither runny nor turned to rubber.
Advancing into his study he dabbles a forefinger
in the fine dust on his desk and calls his wife
who must go twitching to reprimand
the black woman age forty-eight who cleans the apartment.
Outside a Puerto Rican in a uniform
is standing in the street to guard his door
from the riffraff who make riots on television,
in which the university that pays him owns much stock.
Right thinking is virtue, he believes,
and the clarity of the fine violin of his mind
leads him a tense intricate fugue of pleasure.
His children do not think clearly.
They snivel and whine and glower and pant
after false gods who must be blasted with sarcasm
because their barbaric heads
keep growing back in posters on bedroom walls.
His wife does not dare to think.
He married her for her breasts
and soft white belly of surrender arching up.
The greatest pain he has ever known
was getting an impacted wisdom tooth out.
The deepest suffering he ever tasted
was when he failed to get a fellowship
after he had planned his itinerary.
When he curses his dependents
Plato sits on his right hand and Aristotle on his left.
Argument is lean red meat to him.
Moses and Freud and St. Augustine are in his corner.
He is a good man and deserves to judge us all
who go making uncouth noises and bangs in the street.
He is a good man: if you don’t believe me,
ask any god.
He says they all think like him.
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker’s cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn’t she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Are you You or Me or It?
I go littering you over the furniture
and picking you out of the stew.
Often I’ve wished you otherwise: sleek,
docile, decorative and inert.
Yet even in daydreams I cannot imagine myself
otherwise thatched: coarse, black and abundant
like weeds burst from the slagheaps of abandoned mines.
In the ’50’s children used to point and shout Witch.
Later they learned to say Beatnik and later yet, Hippie,
but old grandmamas with Thessaloniki or Kiev in their throats
thought I must be nice because I looked like a peasant.
In college my mother tried to change my life
by bribing me to cut it off and have it “done.”
Afterwards the hairdresser chased me waving my hair in a paper bag.
The next man who happened was a doctor’s son
who quoted the Lord Freud in bed and on the pot,
thought I wrote poems because I lacked a penis
and beat me when he felt ugly.
I grew my hair back just as quick as I could.
Cloud of animal vibrations,
tangle of hides and dark places
you keep off the tidy and the overly clean and the wango upright.
You proclaim the sharp limits of my patience
with trying to look like somebody’s wet dream.
Though I can trim you and throw you out with the coffee grounds,
when I am dead and beginning to smell worse than my shoes
presumably you will continue out of my skull
as if there were inside no brains at all
but only a huge bobbin of black wire unwinding.
They say that trees scream
under the bulldozer’s blade.
That when you give it water,
the potted coleus sings.
Vibrations quiver about leaves
our ears are too gross
to comprehend.
Yet I hear on this street
where sprinklers twirl
on exterior carpeting
a high rising whine.
The grass looks well fed.
It must come from inside
where a woman on downs is making
a creative environment
for her child.
The spring earth cracks
over sprouting seeds.
Hear that subliminal roar,
a wind through grass and skirts,
the sound of hair crackling,
the slither of anger
just surfacing.
Pressed against glass and yellowing,
scrawny, arching up to
the insufficient light, plants
that do not belong in houses
sing of what they want:
like a woman who’s been told
she can’t carry a tune,
like a woman afraid people will laugh
if she raises her voice,
like a woman whose veins surface
compressing a scream,
like a woman whose mouth hardens
to hold locked in her own
harsh and beautiful song.
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.
Blizzards of paper
in slow motion
sift through her.
In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.
Now it is time for finals:
losers will be shot.
Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.
They tell her she is womb-man,
babymachine, mirror image, toy,
earth mother and penis-poor,
a dish of synthetic strawberry icecream
rapidly melting.
She grunts to a halt.
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as the infant does
with her own true hunger
and pleasure
and rage.
When did I first become aware—
hearing myself on the radio?
listening to tapes of women in groups?—
of that diffident laugh that punctuates,
that giggle that apologizes,
that bows fixing parentheses before, after.
That little laugh sticking
in the throat like a chicken bone.
That perfunctory dry laugh
carries no mirth, no joy
but makes a low curtsy, a kowtow
imploring with praying hands:
forgive me, for I do not
take myself seriously.
Do not squash me.
My friend, on the deck we sit
telling horror stories
from the
Marvel Comics
of our lives.
We exchange agonies, battles and after each
we laugh madly and embrace.
That raucous female laughter
is drummed from the belly.
It rackets about kitchens,
flapping crows
up from a carcass.
Hot in the mouth as horseradish,
it clears the sinuses
and the brain.
Years ago I had a friend
who used to laugh with me
braying defiance, as we roar
with bared teeth.
After the locked ward
where they dimmed her with drugs
and exploded her synapses,
she has now that cough
fluttering in her throat
like a crippled pigeon
as she says, but of course
I was sick, you know,
and laughs blood.
Your voice always whacked me right on the funny bone
of the great-hearted suffering bitch fantasy
that ruled me like a huge copper moon with its phases
until I could, partially, break free.
How could I help but cherish you for my bad dreams?
Your voice would grate right on the marrow-filled bone
that cooks up that rich stew of masochism where we swim,
that woman is born to suffer, mistreated and cheated.
We are trained to that hothouse of ripe pain.
Never do we feel so alive, so in character
as when we’re walking the floor with the all-night blues.
When some man not being there who’s better gone
becomes a lack that swells up to a gaseous balloon
and flattens from us all thinking and sensing and purpose.