Circles on the Water
Marge Piercy
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
