The Hunger Moon Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Middlemarsh, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Most of the poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works:

  Stone, Paper, Knife, copyright © 1983 by Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf)

  My Mother’s Body, copyright © 1985 by Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Available Light, copyright © 1988 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Mars and Her Children, copyright © 1992 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?, copyright © 1997 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Early Grrrl, copyright © 1999 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (The Leapfrog Press)

  The Art of Blessing the Day, copyright © 1999 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Colors Passing Through Us, copyright © 2003 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  The Crooked Inheritance, copyright © 2006 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)

  Some new poems in this collection were previously published in the following periodicals: Blue Fifth, Fifth Wednesday, 5 AM, Basalt, Poesis, The Arava Review, Rattle, Tryst, Midstream, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Ibbetson Street Magazine, and Contemporary World Literature.

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Piercy, Marge.

  The hunger moon : new and selected poems, 1980–2010 / by Marge Piercy.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59981-0

  I. Title.

  PS 3566.I4H86 2011

  811′.54—dc22 2010030987

  Cover photograph by Oliver Wasow/Gallery Stock

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  v3.1_r1

  For Ira aka Woody because of his love,

  his help and his willingness to put his shoulder to the great wheel

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  from STONE, PAPER, KNIFE

  A key to common lethal fungi

  The common living dirt

  Toad dreams

  Down at the bottom of things

  A story wet as tears

  Absolute zero in the brain

  Eating my tail

  It breaks

  What’s that smell in the kitchen?

  The weight

  Very late July

  Mornings in various years

  Digging in

  The working writer

  The back pockets of love

  Snow, snow

  In which she begs (like everybody else) that love may last

  Let us gather at the river

  Ashes, ashes, all fall down

  from MY MOTHER’S BODY

  Putting the good things away

  They inhabit me

  Unbuttoning

  Out of the rubbish

  My mother’s body

  How grey, how wet, how cold

  Taking a hot bath

  Sleeping with cats

  The place where everything changed

  The chuppah

  House built of breath

  Nailing up the mezuzah

  The faithless

  And whose creature am I?

  Magic mama

  Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?

  from AVAILABLE LIGHT

  Available light

  Joy Road and Livernois

  Daughter of the African evolution

  The answer to all problems

  After the corn moon

  Perfect weather

  Moon of the mother turtle

  Baboons in the perennial bed

  Something to look forward to

  Litter

  The bottom line

  Morning love song

  Implications of one plus one

  Sun-day poacher

  Burial by salt

  Eat fruit

  Dead Waters

  The housing project at Drancy

  Black Mountain

  The ram’s horn sounding

  from MARS AND HER CHILDREN

  The ark of consequence

  The ex in the supermarket

  Your eyes recall old fantasies

  Getting it back

  How the full moon wakes you

  The cat’s song

  The hunger moon

  For Mars and her children returning in March

  Sexual selection among birds

  Shad blow

  Report of the 14th Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group

  True romance

  Woman in the bushes

  Apple sauce for Eve

  The Book of Ruth and Naomi

  Of the patience called forth by transition

  I have always been poor at flirting

  It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse

  Your father’s fourth heart attack

  Up and out

  The task never completed

  from WHAT ARE BIG GIRLS MADE OF?

  What are big girls made of?

  Elegy in rock, for Audre Lorde

  All systems are up

  For two women shot to death in Brookline, Massachusetts

  A day in the life

  The grey flannel sexual harassment suit

  On guard

  The thief

  Belly good

  The flying Jew

  My rich uncle, whom I only met three times

  Your standard midlife crisis

  The visitation

  Half vulture, half eagle

  The level

  The negative ion dance

  The voice of the grackle

  Salt in the afternoon

  Brotherless one: Sun god

  Brotherless two: Palimpsest

  Brotherless three: Never good enough

  Brotherless four: Liars dance

  Brotherless five: Truth as a cloud of moths

  Brotherless six: Unconversation

  Brotherless seven: Endless end

  from EARLY GRRRL

  The correct method of worshipping cats

  The well preserved man

  Nightcrawler

  I vow to sleep through it

  Midsummer night’s stroll

  The name of that country is lonesome

  Always unsuitable

  from THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY

  The art of blessing the day

  Learning to read

  Snowflakes, my mother called them

  On Shabbat she dances in the candle flame

  In the grip of the solstice

  Woman in a shoe

  Growing up haunted

  At the well

  For each age, its amulet

  Returning to the cemetery in the old Prague ghetto

  The fundamental truth

  Amidah: on our feet we speak to you

  Kaddish

  Wellfleet Shabbat

  The head of the year

  Breadcrumbs

  The New Year of the Trees

  Charoset

  Lamb Shank: Z’roah

  Matzoh

  Maggid

  Coming up on September

  Nishmat

  from COLORS PASSING THROUGH US

  No one came home

  Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps

  One reason I like opera

  My mother g
ives me her recipe

  The good old days at home sweet home

  The day my mother died

  Love has certain limited powers

  Little lights

  Gifts that keep on giving

  The yellow light

  The new era, c. 1946

  Winter promises

  The gardener’s litany

  Eclipse at the solstice

  The rain as wine

  Taconic at midnight

  The equinox rush

  Seder with comet

  The cameo

  Miriam’s cup

  Dignity

  Old cat crying

  Traveling dream

  Kamasutra for dummies

  The first time I tasted you

  Colors passing through us

  from THE CROOKED INHERITANCE

  Tracks

  The crooked inheritance

  Talking with my mother

  Swear it

  Motown, Arsenal of Democracy

  Tanks in the streets

  The Hollywood haircut

  The good, the bad and the inconvenient

  Intense

  How to make pesto

  The moon as cat as peach

  August like lint in the lungs

  Metamorphosis

  Choose a color

  Deadlocked wedlock

  Money is one of those things

  In our name

  Bashert

  The lived in look

  Mated

  My grandmother’s song

  The birthday of the world

  N’eilah

  In the sukkah

  The full moon of Nisan

  Peace in a time of war

  The cup of Eliyahu

  The wind of saying

  Some NEW POEMS

  The low road

  The curse of Wonder Woman

  July Sunday at 10 a.m.

  Football for dummies

  Murder, unincorporated

  The happy man

  Collectors

  First sown

  Away with all that

  All that remains

  What comes next

  Where dreams come from

  The tao of touch

  End of days

  Dates of composition

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  INTRODUCTION

  What’s the difference between the poetry in Circles on the Water, which summarized my first seven books, and this volume, which pulls some poems from the last nine? A lot has changed in almost thirty years. In 1982, I had already moved to Cape Cod and the natural world had begun to provide me with new, rich sources of imagery and experience. I am still politically engaged, as a feminist, as one concerned with environmental issues, with problems of health and aging, with equality and rights for all, with economic oppression, with various local issues—although perhaps a little more relaxed about politics in my social life. Nonetheless, my anger against those who consider themselves entitled to rights that they would deny to others has not diminished and I doubt ever will. Nor does my rage against those who use power to belittle, injure, or kill others whom they consider inferior to themselves.

  In 1981, the first night of Hanukkah, my mother died, and for the next year I said Kaddish for her daily, as I do every year on her yahr­zeit. I was saying gibberish because I had never been bat mitzvahed and knew no Hebrew. Needing to understand what I was saying for my mother, I began to learn at least enough to read and comprehend prayers. This began my reemergence into Judaism. I had begun to host seders for Pesach after the divorce from my second husband and to study the origins, history, and meaning of Pesach. Shortly afterward I entered into the never-ending process of writing my own haggadah, one poem, one passage at a time. [It’s still ongoing, for in spite of my writing Pesach for the Rest of Us, it will never be finished.] I was one of the founders of a havurah Am haYam, people of the sea, on the Outer Cape, a Jewish lay group, and one of the people who ran it for ten years. All of that brought new elements into my poetry. Through Kabbalah, I began to meditate. It keeps me from imploding.

  The death of my mother dug a hole in my life and I have written about her suffering and hard life ever since. In some ways, hers is the face of the women I have fought for and written about. She is a frequent presence in my imagination and my memory. I have also returned frequently to my warm memories of my grandmother Hannah, who gave me my religious education and unconditional love. As I age, I have become aware of how much they gave me.

  I married Ira Wood in 1982 after being in a relationship with him since 1976. While I had written considerable love poetry before, it was mostly poems of unhappy love, rocky affairs, longings unsatisfied. I began to write poems of fulfilled love and about the ongoing joys and problems of living monogamously through the years. I don’t believe I had ever before been happy in any intimate relationship for longer than a matter of days or weeks. I have never regretted my many experiences and adventures when I was in an open relationship, but it is certainly simpler and less demanding to be monogamous on those rare occasions when it actually works out. For us, it has. I think we are each other’s bashert. I cannot imagine being truly mated with anyone else over time. We still prefer talking with each other to anybody else.

  As I grow older, I have had trouble with my eyes—cataracts and glaucoma and extreme myopia inherited from my parents—and my knees. I explore what aging means to me, how it actually happens to me. I have experienced the death of not only my parents and my brother but many friends. My own death has become far more real to me. That also has influenced my poetry. Death is not a sometime visitor but a kind of shadow.

  Everything I learn and experience enriches my poetry, whatever its source.

  I am an intellectually curious person. I do a great deal of research for my novels and my nonfiction works. Out of every epoch of history I study, out of every life and career I explore, poems issue—not from the narrative itself but from what I observe and learn. Whether it’s the French Revolution, appeals court, roses, herring, the origins of dates and almonds, my storehouse of imagery grows wider and deeper.

  I first learned how American I am when I lived in France with my first husband. Since then I have continued to explore what this means, when I am so often at odds with the choices my government makes in this country and in the world outside of us. So often we are dangerous and destructive, and this consciousness is something that also informs my poetry.

  I have explored my own childhood and adolescence far more as I age than I did when I was younger. In all of my last nine books, there are poems that deal with my formative years in Detroit, in my family, in the hood, among the friends and enemies I had then. Writing my memoir, Sleeping with Cats, forced me to return to many eras in my life that I had not entered in decades. It made my life far more vivid to me.

  Ira, cats and the garden and local wildlife and the ocean and the seasons and the weather are part of the daily web of my life. As I write this, we have been snowed in for two days and cannot get out of our driveway. Hurricanes, nor’easters, ice storms, thunder and lightning, prolonged drought are events that impact us powerfully. My life is very different from that of most poets now because I do not have an affiliation with any college or university. I live as I can off my writing and gigs—readings, workshops, speeches, contests I judge, mini-residencies. I live in a village up close with nature in benign and hostile forms—my imposition of value on what simply is and what we have through our greed and carelessness caused. I live not with academics and writers as friends, although I have some of each, but in a locality where my friends are oystermen, a retired homicide detective, a retired OR nurse, carpenters, artists, a librarian, actors, a bank manager, a lawyer, a boat captain, a plumber. Ira Wood has been a selectman, one of the five people who run the town, for a number of years. That also brings us into contact with a wide range of people, both local and summer people. All of this feeds i
nto my poetry, and I believe it’s one of the reasons so many people can relate to what I write, as I hope you can. My poems read well aloud. I like to perform them. So do others. Naturally, I think I do it best.