Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online

floor creaks,
    dust sifts from the ceiling,
    the golden bed has been hauled away
    by the dealer
    in unused dreams.

Ache’s end
    My sweet ache
    is gone.
    Sweet and painful
    caramel, honey
    in a broken tooth.
    You were with me
    like a light cold
    in the bones,
    a rainy day gnawing.
    An awareness
    that would turn down
    to a faint hum
    to an edging of static.
    This caring
    colored my life,
    a wine badly fermented
    with sugar and vinegar
    in suspension.
    A body can grow used
    to a weight,
    used to limping
    and find it hard
    to learn again
    to walk straight.

BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING
From
TO BE OF USE

A work of artifice
    The bonsai tree
    in the attractive pot
    could have grown eighty feet tall
    on the side of a mountain
    till split by lightning.
    But a gardener
    carefully pruned it.
    It is nine inches high.
    Every day as he
    whittles back the branches
    the gardener croons,
    It is your nature
    to be small and cozy,
    domestic and weak;
    how lucky, little tree,
    to have a pot to grow in.
    With living creatures
    one must begin very early
    to dwarf their growth:
    the bound feet,
    the crippled brain,
    the hair in curlers,
    the hands you
    love to touch.

What you waited for
    You called yourself a dishwater blond,
    body warm and flat as beer that’s been standing.
    You always had to stand until your feet were sore
    behind the counter
    with a smile like an outsized safety pin
    holding your lips off your buck teeth.
    Most nights alone or alone with men
    who wiped themselves in you.
    Pass the damp rag over the counter again.
    Tourist cabins and roadhouses of the deaf loudmouth,
    ponds where old boots swim and drive-in moons.
    You came to see yourself as a salesman’s bad joke.
    What did you ever receive for free
    except a fetus you had to pay to yank out.
    Troubles cured you salty as a country ham,
    smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside
    but nobody could take nourishment
    for lacking respect.
    No husband, no baby, no house, nobody to own you
    public as an ashtray you served
    waiting for the light that came at last
    straight into the windshield on the highway.
    Two days later the truckers are pleased.
    Your replacement is plain but ten years younger.
    Women’s lives are shaped like cheap coffins.
    How long will she wait for change?

The secretary chant
    My hips are a desk.
    From my ears hang
    chains of paper clips.
    Rubber bands form my hair.
    My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.
    My feet bear casters.
    Buzz. Click.
    My head is a badly organized file.
    My head is a switchboard
    where crossed lines crackle.
    Press my fingers
    and in my eyes appear
    credit and debit.
    Zing. Tinkle.
    My navel is a reject button.
    From my mouth issue canceled reams.
    Swollen, heavy, rectangular
    I am about to be delivered
    of a baby
    Xerox machine.
    File me under W
    because I wonce
    was
    a woman.

Night letter
    Scalded cat,
    claws, arched back and blistered pride:
    my friend. You’d have cooked down
    my ropy carcass in a kettle for soup.
    I was honing my knife.
    What is friendship
    to the desperate?
    Is it bigger than a meal?
    Before any mirror or man we jostled.
    Fought from angst to Zeno,
    sucked the onion of suspicion,
    poured lie on the telephone.
    Always head on: one raw from divorce court
    spitting toads and nail clippings,
    the other fresh baked from a new final bed
    with strawberry-cream-filled brain.
    One cooing, while the other spat.
    To the hunted
    what is loyalty?
    Is it deeper than an empty purse?
    Wider than a borrowed bed?
    Of my two best friends at school
    I continued to love the first Marie better
    because she died young
    so I could carry her along with me,
    a wizened embryo.
    But you and I clawed at hardscrabble hill
    willing to fight anyone
    especially each other
    to survive.
    Couldn’t we have made alliance?
    We were each so sure
    of the way out,
    the way in.
    Now they’ve burnt out your nerves, my lungs.
    We are better fed
    but no better understood,
    scabby and gruff with battle.
    Bits of our love are filed