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

ask?
    Nothing, you’d answer, eyes full
    of nothing. He goes through women
    quickly, a friend said, and now
    I see how you pass through,
    in a sealed train
    leaving a hole like a tunnel.

A shadow play for guilt
1.
    A man can lie to himself.
    A man can lie with his tongue
    and his brain and his gesture;
    a man can lie with his life.
    But the body is simple as a turtle
    and straight as a dog:
    the body cannot lie.
    You want to take your good body off like a glove.
    You want to stretch it and shrink it
    as you change your abstractions.
    You stand in flesh with shame.
    You smell your fingers and lick your disgust
    and are satisfied.
    But the beaten dog of the body remembers.
    Blood has ghosts too.
2.
    You speak of the collective.
    Then you form your decisions
    and visit them on others
    like an ax. Broken open I have learned
    to mistrust a man whose rhetoric is good
    and whose ambition is fierce:
    a man who says
we
, moving us,
    and means
I
and
mine.
3.
    Many people have a thing they want to protect.
    Sometimes the property is wheat, oil fields, slum housing,
    plains on which brown people pick green tomatoes,
    stocks in safety deposit boxes, computer patents,
    thirty dollars in a shoebox under a mattress.
    Maybe it’s a woman they own and her soft invisible labor.
    Maybe it’s images from childhood of how things should be.
    The revolutionary says, we can let go.
    We both used to say that a great deal.
    If what we change does not change us
    we are playing with blocks.
4.
    Always you were dancing before the altar of guilt.
    A frowning man with clenched fists
    you fixed to my breasts with grappling hooks to feed
    gritting your teeth for fear
    a good word would slip out:
    a man who came back again and again
    yet made sure that his coming was attended by pain
    and marked by a careful coldness,
    as if gentleness were an inventory that could run low,
    as if loving were an account that could be overdrawn,
    as if tenderness saved drew interest.
    You are a capitalist of yourself.
    You hoard for fantasies and deceptions
    and the slow seep of energy from the loins.
    You fondle your fears and coddle them
    while you urge others on.
    Among your fantasies and abstractions
    ranged like favorite battered toys,
    you stalk with a new item, gutted
    from what was alive and curious.
    Now it is safe,
    private and tight as a bank vault
    or a tomb.

Song of the fucked duck
    In using there are always two.
    The manipulator dances with a partner who cons herself.
    There are lies that glow so brightly we consent
    to give a finger and then an arm
    to let them burn.
    I was dazzled by the crowd where everyone called my name.
    Now I stand outside the funhouse exit, down the slide
    reading my guidebook of Marx in Esperanto
    and if I don’t know anymore which way means forward
    down is where my head is, next to my feet.
    Form follows function, says the organizer
    and turns himself into a paper clip,
    into a vacuum cleaner,
    into a machine gun.
    Function follows analysis
    but the forebrain
    is only an owl in the tree of self.
    One third of life we prowl in the grottoes of sleep
    where neglected worms ripen into dragons,
    where the spoiled pencil swells into an oak,
    and the cows of our early sins are called home chewing their cuds
    and turning the sad faces of our childhood upon us.
    Come back and scrub the floor, the stain is still there,
    come back with your brush and kneel down,
    scrub and scrub again, it will never be clean.
    Buried desires sprout like mushrooms on the chin of the morning.
    The will to be totally rational
    is the will to be made out of glass and steel:
    and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
    The cockroach knows as much as you about living.
    We trust with our hands and our mouths.
    The cunt accepts. The teeth and back reject.
    What we have to give each other:
    dumb and mysterious as water swirling.
    Always in the long corridors of the psyche
    doors are opening and doors are slamming shut.
    We rise each day to give birth or to