Circles on the Water Read online

  Also by Marge Piercy

  Poetry

  The Crooked Inheritance

  Colors Passing Through Us

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Early Grrrl

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Mars and Her Children

  Available Light

  My Mother’s Body

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  The Moon Is Always Female

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

  Living in the Open

  To Be of Use

  4-Telling (with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)

  Hard Loving

  Breaking Camp

  Novels

  Body of Glass

  Sex Wars

  The Third Child

  Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  The Longings of Women

  He, She and It

  Summer People

  Gone to Soldiers

  Fly Away Home

  Braided Lives

  Vida

  The High Cost of Living

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  Small Changes

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Going Down Fast

  Other

  The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

  Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

  The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982 by Marge Piercy

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Breaking Camp was published in 1968, and Hard Loving in 1969 by Wesleyan University Press: thirty-eight poems are reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  4-Telling was published in 1971 by The Crossing Press.

  To Be of Use was published in 1973 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.

  Living in the Open was published in 1976, The Twelve-Spoked Wheel

  Flashing in 1978, and The Moon Is Always Female in 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Piercy, Marge. Circles on the water. I. Title.

  PS3566.I4A6 1982 811’.54 81-17210

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76219-1

  Published May 19, 1982

  Reprinted Fourteen Times

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  From BREAKING CAMP

  Kneeling at the pipes

  Visiting a dead man on a summer day

  Girl in white

  Noon of the sunbather

  A valley where I don’t belong

  S. dead

  Hallow Eve with spaces for ghosts

  Landed fish

  A few ashes for Sunday morning

  Concerning the mathematician

  Postcard from the garden

  The cats of Greece

  Sign

  A married walk in a hot place

  The Peaceable Kingdom

  Gasman invites the skyscrapers to dance

  The skyscrapers of the financial district dance with Gasman

  Breaking camp

  From HARD LOVING

  Walking into love

  Community

  The neighbor

  The friend

  The morning half-life blues

  Erasure

  The cyclist

  Juan’s twilight dance

  Learning experience

  Half past home

  Simple-song

  For Jeriann’s hands

  I am a light you could read by

  Crabs

  Trajectory of the traveling Susan

  The butt of winter

  Bronchitis on the 14th floor

  The death of the small commune

  The track of the master builder

  Why the soup tastes like the Daily News

  Curse of the earth magician on a metal land

  From 4-TELLING

  Letter to be disguised as a gas bill

  Sojourners

  Under the grind

  Somehow

  Never-never

  Ache’s end

  From TO BE OF USE

  A work of artifice

  What you waited for

  The secretary chant

  Night letter

  In the men’s room(s)

  The nuisance

  I will not be your sickness

  The thrifty lover

  A shadow play for guilt

  Song of the fucked duck

  A just anger

  The crippling

  Right thinking man

  Barbie doll

  Hello up there

  High frequency

  The woman in the ordinary

  Unlearning to not speak

  Women’s laughter

  Burying blues for Janis

  The best defense is offensive

  Icon

  Some collisions bring luck

  We become new

  Meetings like hungry beaks

  To be of use

  Bridging

  Doing it differently

  The spring offensive of the snail

  Councils

  Laying down the tower (Introduction)

  The queen of pentacles

  The overturning of the tower

  The nine of cups

  The knight of swords

  The eight of swords

  The seven of pentacles

  The magician

  The three of cups

  The emperor

  The judgment

  The sun

  From LIVING IN THE OPEN

  Living in the open

  I awoke with the room cold

  Gracious goodness

  Homesick

  Seedlings in the mail

  The daily life of the worker bee

  Cod summer

  A proposal for recycling wastes

  The bumpity road to mutual devotion

  On Castle Hill

  From Sand Roads

  7. The development

  8. The road behind the last dune

  Rough times

  Phyllis wounded

  Rape poem

  The consumer

  The provocation of the dream

  Looking at quilts

  To the pay toilet

  All clear

  Unclench yourself

  The homely war

  From THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING

  The twelve-spoked wheel flashing

  What the owl sees

  The Greater Grand Rapids lover

  The Lansing bad penny come again blues

  The poet dreams of a nice warm motel

  Skimpy day at the solstice

  The market economy

  The love of lettuce

  Martha as the angel Gabriel

  Snow in May

  The window of the woman burning

  Going in

  Athena in the front lines

  The root canal

  Doors in the wind and the water

  You ask why sometimes I say stop

  Smalley Bar

  For Shoshana Rihn—Pat Swinton

  In the wet />
  Crows

  If they come in the night

  At the core

  Beauty I would suffer for

  A gift of light

  From THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE

  The inside chance

  Night flight

  Excursions, incursions

  Apologies

  The long death

  The cast off

  Rainy 4th

  Attack of the squash people

  Intruding

  September afternoon at four o’clock

  Morning athletes

  Cats like angels

  For strong women

  For the young who want to

  Hand games

  Right to life

  Shadows of the burning

  The sabbath of mutual respect

  The perpetual migration

  The longest night

  Crescent moon like a canoe

  SEVEN NEW POEMS

  It breaks

  What’s that smell in the kitchen?

  Wind is the wall of the year

  Laocoön is the name of the figure

  Snow, snow

  Digging in

  Let us gather at the river

  About the Author

  Introduction

  An introduction might be a kind of envoi: Go little book out into the world and wheedle your way into the lives of strangers like a stray kitten. However, a selected poems is not little; and Go big fat book out into the world and impose upon strangers like a loose elephant, lacks appeal. An introduction could be an apologia, but how redundant when the poems already coax, lecture, lull, seduce, exhort, denounce. As a poet I am bound to the attempt to capture in amber the mayflies of the moment and render them into the only jewels I have to give you. I guess I will settle for saying what I imagine I am doing.

  Usually the voice of the poems is mine. Rarely do I speak through a mask or persona. The experiences, however, are not always mine, and although my major impulse to autobiography has played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have never made a distinction in working up my own experience and other people’s. When I am writing, I’m not aware of the difference, to be honest. I suppose that is why I have never considered myself a confessional poet. In either case I am often pushing the experience beyond realism.

  I imagine that I speak for a constituency, living and dead, and that I give utterance to energy, experience, insight, words flowing from many lives. I have always desired that my poems work for others. “To be of use” is the title of one of my favorite poems and one of my best-known books—now out of print as a result of the Thor decision by the IRS to tax publisher’s backlists.

  What I mean by being of use is not that the poems function as agitprop or are didactic, although some of them are. I have no more hesitation than Pope or Hesiod did to write in that mode as well as in many others. The notion that poetry with a conscious rather than an unconscious politics is impermissible or impure is a modern heresy of advantage only to those who like just fine the way things are going. We are social animals and we live with and off and on each other. You would have had great trouble explaining to Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus, Chaucer, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Whitman, Blake, Goethe, that poetry refers only to other poetry and that poets are strange and special people who have no social connections, social interests, social duties.

  What I mean by useful is simply that readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance. We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives.

  Although I love the work of many other poets and am always reading it and being moved by it and seeing new kinds of poems to write and new openings through the work of others, although I criticize poetry, I am not a poet who writes primarily for the approval or attention of other poets. When they like my work, I am very pleased, but poets are not my primary constituency. Poetry is too important to keep to ourselves. One of the oldest habits of our species, poetry is powerful in aligning the psyche. A poem can momentarily integrate the different kinds of knowing of our different and often warring levels of brain, from the reptilian part that recognizes rhythms and responds to them up through the mammalian centers of the emotions, from symbolic knowing as in dreams to analytical thinking, through rhythms and sound and imagery as well as overt meaning. A poem can momentarily heal not only the alienation of thought and feeling Eliot discussed, but can fuse the different kinds of knowing and for at least some instants weld mind back into body seamlessly.

  Knopf has published my last three volumes of poetry. My editor, Nancy Nicholas, is extremely understanding about what I try to do with each collection. Each book is an artifact and the poems in it are placed in a particular order to work as a whole as well as individually. I may love a poem and judge it excellent and yet hold it out of book after book until at last it finds its appropriate niche. However, Nancy said to me, Establish your canon thus far with this book. That I cannot do. I have left out poems I know are favorites of readers and of critics and poems I respect as well as any here. I have merely tried to select an appropriate number of poems from each volume with some kind of balance of the various sorts I have written.

  I have made minor changes in some, and a very few I have substantially altered. The minor changes are mostly an image, a line, a redundancy of which I have become aware over the years of saying these poems to audiences. Occasionally I am correcting an old typo that had corrupted the written text.

  The poems I have rewritten are those, generally early ones, where I fudged. One poem, “Bronchitis on the 14th floor,” I changed for publication into a monogamous poem. It was about the sense of being taken care of by three men while I was sick—the basic imagery of them as large strong animals (bears, horses pulling a troika) while I was extremely and vulnerably ill. I had always felt the poem under the printed poem, and suspected that the official version was weakened by being rendered conventionally.

  With “Breaking Camp,” for instance, the prevailing patriarchal mode encouraged me to write a dishonest poem. Basically it intended to be a sursum corda of sorts, written at a time I was becoming more and more involved in SDS and the antiwar movement and we were moving from protest to resistance. I wrote the poem with the male being the leader because that was how it was supposed to be. I was basically arguing we had to live differently and be prepared to take more risks, but I cast it as if I were giving in to my husband’s insistence. Without that paraphernalia of imitation compliance, the poem is shorter, cleaner, more powerful. A kind of coyness enforced by rigid sex roles used to hurt women’s work, and that poem was one of the places in my output I find it.

  Except for some apprentice and overly literary work in Breaking Camp, and even including a fair number of poems from that, my first volume, my work is of a piece. I can do more and try more, but the voice is the same voice. If there is a change of substance, I would say it followed upon my moving from New York to Wellfleet after having lived in the center of cities my whole life. I moved because of bad health, so I could go on breathing, but the settling here had unexpected results for me.

  I live here in Wellfleet in many ways like a peasant—a middle peasant—on a couple of acres where we grow all our own vegetables and some fruit and freeze, dry, pickle, can, root-cellar the surplus for the whole year. I fell in love with the land, in its fragility and fruitfulness, and I fell in love with this landscape. There is something of Michigan here that connects with early childhood visits in the car out from Detroit into heaven, whether heaven was two weeks in a rented cottage on a muddy lake with a rowboat, or Sunda
ys at Lucy and Lon’s tenant farm, where they would kill a chicken for us to take back as our big treat.

  But the ocean, the salt- and fresh-water marshes, the sky and the light fascinate me too. I have sunk roots and I am really happy only when I am here. I know the city—it is bred into me, and for thirty-six years I knew nothing else summer and winter. Most of the year I spend a couple of days every week in Boston. Living in Wellfleet, I have learned a whole new language of the natural world that I am part of, and that knowledge has changed and enriched my work.

  I have readers who love my poems about the Cape, about zucchini and lettuce and tomatoes, and simply skip or tune out the poems about an old working-class woman lying in a nursing home or about nuclear power. Then I have readers who love the poems they call feminist or political, but ask me why I write about blue heron and oak trees.

  I have to confess, for me it is all one vision. There are occasional poems where I try to tie it all together, like “A gift of light.” “The lunar cycle” does that on another, less individual, more complex level. Although I consider that cycle very, very important in the body of my work, I have included only a few of those poems here, since it forms the second half of my most recent book, The Moon Is Always Female.

  I have included poems in this volume in a very long line, in a very short line, in a line that hovers around iambic pentameter or tetrameter, in verse paragraphs, in undifferentiated columns, in stanzas. I haven’t put any rhymed poems into this collection, although once in a great while I do work in rhyme. If I rhyme, I mostly do so in the center of lines rather than on the end, where to my ear it sticks out and chimes.

  Since every time I put together a collection, I leave out as much as I put in, this is very much a selection of a small piece of a number of selections. I apologize if your favorite poem is not here. Some of mine are also missing.

  Marge Piercy

  Wellfleet, Massachusetts

  1981

  From BREAKING CAMP

  Kneeling at the pipes

  Princely cockroach, inheritor,

  I used to stain the kitchen wall with your brothers,

  flood you right down the basin.

  I squashed you underfoot, making faces.

  I repent.

  I am relieved to hear somebody

  will survive our noises.

  Thoughtlessly I judged you dirty

  while dropping poisons and freeways and bombs

  on the melted landscape.

  I want to bribe you