Marge Piercy

In flat America, in Chicago, Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. Forty feet of Corinthian candle celebrate Pullman embedded lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. The Potter Palmers float in an island parthenon. Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat are postmarked with angels and lambs. But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow, sketched light arch within arch delicate as fingernail moons. The green doors should not be locked. Doors of fern and flower should not be shut. Louis Sullivan, I sit on your grave. It is not now good weather for prophets. Sun eddies on the steelsmoke air like sinking honey. On the inner green door of the Getty tomb (a thighbone's throw from your stone) a marvel of growing, blooming, thrusting into seed: how all living wreathe and insinuate in the circlet of repetition that never repeats: ever new birth never rebirth. Each tide pool microcosm spiraling from your hand. Sullivan, you had another five years when your society would give you work. Thirty years with want crackling in your hands. Thirty after years with cities flowering and turning grey in your beard. All poets are unemployed nowadays. My country marches in its sleep. The past structures a heavy mausoleum hiding its iron frame in masonry. Men burn like grass while armies grow. Thirty years in the vast rumbling gut of this society you stormed to be used, screamed no louder than any other breaking voice. The waste of a good man bleeds the future that's come in Chicago, in flat America, where the poor still bleed from the teeth, housed in sewers and filing cabinets, where prophets may spit into the wind till anger sleets their eyes shut, where this house that dances the seasons and the braid of all living and the joy of a man making his new good thing is strange, irrelevant as a meteor, in Chicago, in flat America in this year of our burning.

That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it. --Henry Thoreau The dream of toads: we rarely credit what we consider lesser life with emotions big as ours, but we are easily distracted, abstracted. People sit nibbling before television's flicker watching ghosts chase balls and each other while the skunk is out risking grisly death to cross the highway to mate; while the fox scales the wire fence where it knows the shotgun lurks to taste the sweet blood of a hen. Birds are greedy little bombs bursting to give voice to appetite. I had a cat who died of love. Dogs trail their masters across con- tinents. We are far too busy to be starkly simple in passion. We will never dream the intense wet spring lust of the toads.

Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch ; to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can’t do it, you say it’s killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced.

The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.

The songs we join in are beeswax candles burning with no smoke a clean fire licking at the evening our voices small flames quivering. The songs string us like beads on the hour. The ritual is its own melody that leads us where we have gone before and hope to go again, the comfort of year after year. Order: we must touch each base of the haggadah as we pass, blessing, handwashing, dipping this and that. Voices half harmonize on the brukhahs. Dear faces like a multitude of moons hang over the table and the truest brief blessing: affection and peace that we make.

A row of tall skinny candles burns quickly into the night air, the shames raised over the rest for its hard work. Darkness rushes in after the sun sinks like a bright plug pulled. Our eyes drown in night thick as ink pudding. When even the moon starves to a sliver of quicksilver the little candles poke holes in the blackness. A time to eat fat and oil, a time to gamble for pennies and gambol *shames: the middle candle that lights the others every night

The hinge of the year the great gates opening and then slowly slowly closing on us. I always imagine those gates hanging over the ocean fiery over the stone grey waters of evening. We cast what we must change about ourselves onto the waters flowing to the sea. The sins, errors, bad habits, whatever you call them, dissolve. When I was little I cried out I! I! I! I want, I want. Older, I feel less important, a worker bee in the hive of history, miles of hard labor to make my sweetness. The gates are closing The light is failing I kneel before what I love imploring that it may live. So much breaks, wears down, fails in us. We must forgive our broken promises— their sharp shards in our hands.

1. The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads: then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. My father heard the crash but paid no mind, napping after lunch yet fifteen hundred miles north I heard and dropped a dish. Your pain sunk talons in my skull and crouched there cawing, heavy as a great vessel filled with water, oil or blood, till suddenly next day the weight lifted and I knew your mind had guttered out like the Chanukah candles that burn so fast, weeping veils of wax down the chanukiya. Those candles were laid out, friends invited, ingredients bought for latkes and apple pancakes, that holiday for liberation and the winter solstice when tops turn like little planets. Shall you have all or nothing take half or pass by untouched? Nothing you got,Nun said the dreydl as the room stopped spinning. The angel folded you up like laundry your body thin as an empty dress. Your clothes were curtains hanging on the window of what had been your flesh and now was glass. Outside in Florida shopping plazas loudspeakers blared Christmas carols and palm trees were decked with blinking lights. Except by the tourist hotels, the beaches were empty. Pelicans with pregnant pouches flapped overhead like pterodactyls. In my mind I felt you die. First the pain lifted and then you flickered and went out. 2. I walk through the rooms of memory. Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths, every chair ghostly and muted. Other times memory lights up from within bustling scenes acted just the other side of a scrim through which surely I could reach my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain of time which is and isn’t and will be the stuff of which we’re made and unmade. In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen your first nasty marriage just annulled, thin from your abortion, clutching a book against your cheek and trying to look older, trying to look middle class, trying for a job at Wanamaker’s, dressing for parties in cast off stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes were hazy with dreams. You did not notice me waving as you wandered past and I saw your slip was showing. You stood still while I fixed your clothes, as if I were your mother. Remember me combing your springy black hair, ringlets that seemed metallic, glittering; remember me dressing you, my seventy year old mother who was my last dollbaby, giving you too late what your youth had wanted. 3. What is this mask of skin we wear, what is this dress of flesh, this coat of few colors and little hair? This voluptuous seething heap of desires and fears, squeaking mice turned up in a steaming haystack with their babies? This coat has been handed down, an heirloom this coat of black hair and ample flesh, this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin. This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks they provided cushioning for my grandmother Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me and we all sat on them in turn, those major muscles on which we walk and walk and walk over the earth in search of peace and plenty. My mother is my mirror and I am hers. What do we see? Our face grown young again, our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant. Our arms quivering with fat, eyes set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy, our belly seamed with childbearing, Give me your dress that I might try it on. Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat. I will not fit you mother. I will not be the bride you can dress, the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew, a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth. You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound. Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks barbed and drawing blood with their caress. My twin, my sister, my lost love, I carry you in me like an embryo as once you carried me. 4. What is it we turn from, what is it we fear? Did I truly think you could put me back inside? Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten furnace and be recast, that I would become you? What did you fear in me, the child who wore your hair, the woman who let that black hair grow long as a banner of darkness, when you a proper flapper wore yours cropped? You pushed and you pulled on my rubbery flesh, you kneaded me like a ball of dough. Rise, rise, and then you pounded me flat. Secretly the bones formed in the bread. I became willful, private as a cat. You never knew what alleys I had wandered. You called me bad and I posed like a gutter queen in a dress sewn of knives. All I feared was being stuck in a box with a lid. A good woman appeared to me indistinguishable from a dead one except that she worked all the time. Your payday never came. Your dreams ran with bright colors like Mexican cottons that bled onto the drab sheets of the day and would not bleach with scrubbing. My dear, what you said was one thing but what you sang was another, sweetly subversive and dark as blackberries and I became the daughter of your dream. This body is your body, ashes now and roses, but alive in my eyes, my breasts, my throat, my thighs. You run in me a tang of salt in the creek waters of my blood, you sing in my mind like wine. What you did not dare in your life you dare in mine.

The first lily of June opens its red mouth. All over the sand road where we walk multiflora rose climbs trees cascading white or pink blossoms, simple, intense the scene drifting like colored mist. The arrowhead is spreading its creamy clumps of flower and the blackberries are blooming in the thickets. Season of joy for the bee. The green will never again be so green, so purely and lushly new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads into the wind. Rich fresh wine of June, we stagger into you smeared with pollen, overcome as the turtle laying her eggs in roadside sand.

The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through. The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear; the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken. The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dan- gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival. The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths, Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina 2 leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. 3 So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports— out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage, who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of every- thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves. * A popular preacher or an angel who conveys, in mysterious ways, teachings only to scholars worthy ofl such communications (Hebrew). 2. Golden land (Yiddish). 3. A reference to the biblical Exodus out of Egypt.