Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online Page A

in dossiers
    of the appropriate organizations.
    Bits of our love are moldering
    in the Lost and Found offices of bankrupt railroads.
    Bits stick like broken glass
    in the minds of our well-earned enemies.
    Regret is a damp wind
    off the used car lot
    where most of our peers came to rest.
    Now—years too late—my voice quavers,
    Can I help?

In the men’s room(s)
    When I was young I believed in intellectual conversation:
    I thought the patterns we wove on stale smoke
    floated off to the heaven of ideas.
    To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse
    like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,
    suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.
    They were talking of integrity and existential ennui
    while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions
    in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.
    Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:
    when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,
    when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,
    they said, she is trying to attract our attention,
    she is offering up her breasts and thighs.
    I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:
    they saw a fish peddler hawking in the street.
    Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.
    I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.
    I try hard to remember to watch what people do.
    Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.
    Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
    watch who they beat and who they eat,
    watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.
    The rest is decoration.

The nuisance
    I am an inconvenient woman.
    I’d be more useful as a pencil sharpener or a cash register.
    I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones or the surf coming in
    or my pussycats or a good piece of steak.
    I love the sun prickly on the black stubble of your cheek.
    I love you wandering floppy making scarecrows of despair.
    I love you when you are discussing changes in the class structure
    and it jams my ears and burns in the tips of my fingers.
    I am an inconvenient woman.
    You might trade me in on a sheepdog or a llama.
    You might trade me in for a yak.
    They are faithful and demand only straw.
    They make good overcoats.
    They never call you up on the telephone.
    I love you with my arms and my legs
    and my brains and my cunt and my unseemly history.
    I want to tell you about when I was ten and it thundered.
    I want you to kiss the crosshatched remains of my burn.
    I want to read you poems about drowning myself
    laid like eggs without shells at fifteen under Shelley’s wings.
    I want you to read my old loverletters.
    I want you to want me
    as directly and simply and variously
    as a cup of hot coffee.
    To want to, to have to, to miss what can’t have room to happen.
    I carry my love for you
    around with me like my teeth
    and I am starving.

I will not be your sickness
    Opening like a marigold
    crop of sun and dry soil
    acrid, bright, sturdy.
    Spreading its cancer
    through the conduits of the body,
    a slow damp murder.
    Breathing like the sea
    glowing with foam and plankton.
    Rigid as an iron post
    driven between my breasts.
    Will you lift your hands
    and shape this love
    into a thing of goodness?
    Will you permit me to live
    when you are not looking?
    Will you let me ask questions
    with my mouth open?
    I will not pretend any longer
    to be a wind or a mood.
    Even with our eyes closed
    we are walking on someone’s map.

The thrifty lover
    At the last moment you decided
    to take the bus
    rather than the plane,
    to squander those hours
    staring at your reflection
    on a dark pane.
    Then all night you rummaged
    my flesh for some body else.
    You pinched and kneaded
    testing for ripeness, rot,
    suspicious and about to reject me
    or knock down the price.
    You lectured me like a classroom
    on your reading of the week,
    used homilies, reconditioned anecdotes,
    jokes with rebuilt transmissions.
    All the time your eyes veered.
    What’s wrong, I would