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Authors: Marge Piercy
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really be together
caught in the teeth of the machinery
of the wrong moments of our lives.
A clear umbilicus
goes out invisibly between,
thread we spin fluid and finer than hair
but strong enough to hang a bridge on.
That bridge will be there
a blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull
whenever you need
whenever you can open your eyes and want
to walk upon it.
Nobody can live on a bridge
or plant potatoes
but it is fine for comings and goings,
meetings, partings and long views
and a real connection to someplace else
where you may
in the crazy weathers of struggle
now and again want to be.
Doing it differently
1.
Trying to enter each other,
trying to interpenetrate and let go.
Trying not to lie down in the same old rutted bed
part rack, part cocoon.
We are bagged in habit
like clothes back from the cleaners.
The map of your veins has been studied,
your thighs have been read and reported,
a leaden mistrust of the rhetoric of tenderness
thickens your tongue.
At the worst you see old movies in my eyes.
How can I persuade you that every day we choose
to give birth, to murder or feed our friends, to die a little.
2.
You are an opening in me.
Smoke thick as pitch blows in,
a wind bearing ribbons of sweet rain,
and the sun as field of dandelions, as rusty razor blade.
Scent colors the air with tear gas, with lemon lilies.
Most of the time you are not here.
Mostly I do not touch you.
Mostly I am talking to someone else.
I crawl into you, a bee furry with greed
into the deep trumpeting throat of a crimson lily
speckled like a newly hatched robin.
I roll, heavy with nectar.
Later, I will turn this afternoon into honey
and live on it, frugally.
It will sweeten my tea.
3.
In the pit of the night our bodies merge,
dark clouds passing through each other in lightning,
the joining of rivers far underground in the stone.
I feel thick but hollow, a polyp floating on currents.
My nerves have opened wide mouths
to drink you in and sing O O on the dark
till I cannot fix boundaries where you start and I stop.
Then you are most vulnerable.
In me that nakedness does not close by day.
My quick, wound, door, my opening,
my lidless eye.
Don’t you think it takes trust,
your strength, your temper always
in the room with us like a doberman leashed.
Touch is the primal sense—
for in the womb we swam lapped and tingling.
Fainting, practicing death, we lose
sight first, then hearing, the mouth and nose deaden
but still till the end we can touch.
I fear manipulation by that handle.
Trust flourishes like a potato plant, mostly underground:
wan flowers, dusty leaves chewed by beetles,
but under the mulch as we dig
at every node of the matted tangle
the tubers, egg-shaped and golden with translucent skin,
tumble from the dirt to feed us
homely and nourishing.
4.
The Digger Indians were too primitive,
pushed onto the sparse alkaline plateau,
to make pottery that could stand on the fire.
They used to make soup by heating an oval stone
and dropping it in the pot cracking hot.
When traders came and sold them iron kettles
the women found cooking easier
but said the soup never tasted so good again.
Soup stone
blunt, heavy in my hands,
you soak, you hold, you radiate warmth,
you can serve as a weapon,
you can be used again and again
and you give a flavor to things I could miss.
5.
Beds that are mirrors,
beds that are rotisseries where I am the barbecue,
beds that are athletic fields for the Olympic trials,
beds that are dartboards, beds that are dentist’s chairs,
beds that are consolation prizes floating on chicken soup,
beds where lobotomies are haphazardly performed, beds
that ride glittering through lies like a ferris wheel,
all the beds where a woman and a man
try to steal each other’s bones
and call it love.
Yet that small commitment floating on a sea of spilled blood
has meaning if we inflict it.
Otherwise we fail into dry accommodation.
If we do not
caught in the teeth of the machinery
of the wrong moments of our lives.
A clear umbilicus
goes out invisibly between,
thread we spin fluid and finer than hair
but strong enough to hang a bridge on.
That bridge will be there
a blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull
whenever you need
whenever you can open your eyes and want
to walk upon it.
Nobody can live on a bridge
or plant potatoes
but it is fine for comings and goings,
meetings, partings and long views
and a real connection to someplace else
where you may
in the crazy weathers of struggle
now and again want to be.
Doing it differently
1.
Trying to enter each other,
trying to interpenetrate and let go.
Trying not to lie down in the same old rutted bed
part rack, part cocoon.
We are bagged in habit
like clothes back from the cleaners.
The map of your veins has been studied,
your thighs have been read and reported,
a leaden mistrust of the rhetoric of tenderness
thickens your tongue.
At the worst you see old movies in my eyes.
How can I persuade you that every day we choose
to give birth, to murder or feed our friends, to die a little.
2.
You are an opening in me.
Smoke thick as pitch blows in,
a wind bearing ribbons of sweet rain,
and the sun as field of dandelions, as rusty razor blade.
Scent colors the air with tear gas, with lemon lilies.
Most of the time you are not here.
Mostly I do not touch you.
Mostly I am talking to someone else.
I crawl into you, a bee furry with greed
into the deep trumpeting throat of a crimson lily
speckled like a newly hatched robin.
I roll, heavy with nectar.
Later, I will turn this afternoon into honey
and live on it, frugally.
It will sweeten my tea.
3.
In the pit of the night our bodies merge,
dark clouds passing through each other in lightning,
the joining of rivers far underground in the stone.
I feel thick but hollow, a polyp floating on currents.
My nerves have opened wide mouths
to drink you in and sing O O on the dark
till I cannot fix boundaries where you start and I stop.
Then you are most vulnerable.
In me that nakedness does not close by day.
My quick, wound, door, my opening,
my lidless eye.
Don’t you think it takes trust,
your strength, your temper always
in the room with us like a doberman leashed.
Touch is the primal sense—
for in the womb we swam lapped and tingling.
Fainting, practicing death, we lose
sight first, then hearing, the mouth and nose deaden
but still till the end we can touch.
I fear manipulation by that handle.
Trust flourishes like a potato plant, mostly underground:
wan flowers, dusty leaves chewed by beetles,
but under the mulch as we dig
at every node of the matted tangle
the tubers, egg-shaped and golden with translucent skin,
tumble from the dirt to feed us
homely and nourishing.
4.
The Digger Indians were too primitive,
pushed onto the sparse alkaline plateau,
to make pottery that could stand on the fire.
They used to make soup by heating an oval stone
and dropping it in the pot cracking hot.
When traders came and sold them iron kettles
the women found cooking easier
but said the soup never tasted so good again.
Soup stone
blunt, heavy in my hands,
you soak, you hold, you radiate warmth,
you can serve as a weapon,
you can be used again and again
and you give a flavor to things I could miss.
5.
Beds that are mirrors,
beds that are rotisseries where I am the barbecue,
beds that are athletic fields for the Olympic trials,
beds that are dartboards, beds that are dentist’s chairs,
beds that are consolation prizes floating on chicken soup,
beds where lobotomies are haphazardly performed, beds
that ride glittering through lies like a ferris wheel,
all the beds where a woman and a man
try to steal each other’s bones
and call it love.
Yet that small commitment floating on a sea of spilled blood
has meaning if we inflict it.
Otherwise we fail into dry accommodation.
If we do not
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