THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2011 by Middlemarsh, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Most of the poems in this collection originally appeared in the following works:
Stone, Paper, Knife, copyright © 1983 by Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf)
My Mother’s Body, copyright © 1985 by Marge Piercy (Alfred A. Knopf)
Available Light, copyright © 1988 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
Mars and Her Children, copyright © 1992 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
What Are Big Girls Made Of?, copyright © 1997 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
Early Grrrl, copyright © 1999 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (The Leapfrog Press)
The Art of Blessing the Day, copyright © 1999 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
Colors Passing Through Us, copyright © 2003 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
The Crooked Inheritance, copyright © 2006 by Middlemarsh, Inc. (Alfred A. Knopf)
Some new poems in this collection were previously published in the following periodicals: Blue Fifth, Fifth Wednesday, 5 AM, Basalt, Poesis, The Arava Review, Rattle, Tryst, Midstream, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Ibbetson Street Magazine, and Contemporary World Literature.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Piercy, Marge.
The hunger moon : new and selected poems, 1980–2010 / by Marge Piercy.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59981-0
I. Title.
PS 3566.I4H86 2011
811′.54—dc22 2010030987
Cover photograph by Oliver Wasow/Gallery Stock
Cover design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1_r1
For Ira aka Woody because of his love,
his help and his willingness to put his shoulder to the great wheel
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
from STONE, PAPER, KNIFE
A key to common lethal fungi
The common living dirt
Toad dreams
Down at the bottom of things
A story wet as tears
Absolute zero in the brain
Eating my tail
It breaks
What’s that smell in the kitchen?
The weight
Very late July
Mornings in various years
Digging in
The working writer
The back pockets of love
Snow, snow
In which she begs (like everybody else) that love may last
Let us gather at the river
Ashes, ashes, all fall down
from MY MOTHER’S BODY
Putting the good things away
They inhabit me
Unbuttoning
Out of the rubbish
My mother’s body
How grey, how wet, how cold
Taking a hot bath
Sleeping with cats
The place where everything changed
The chuppah
House built of breath
Nailing up the mezuzah
The faithless
And whose creature am I?
Magic mama
Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?
from AVAILABLE LIGHT
Available light
Joy Road and Livernois
Daughter of the African evolution
The answer to all problems
After the corn moon
Perfect weather
Moon of the mother turtle
Baboons in the perennial bed
Something to look forward to
Litter
The bottom line
Morning love song
Implications of one plus one
Sun-day poacher
Burial by salt
Eat fruit
Dead Waters
The housing project at Drancy
Black Mountain
The ram’s horn sounding
from MARS AND HER CHILDREN
The ark of consequence
The ex in the supermarket
Your eyes recall old fantasies
Getting it back
How the full moon wakes you
The cat’s song
The hunger moon
For Mars and her children returning in March
Sexual selection among birds
Shad blow
Report of the 14th Subcommittee on Convening a Discussion Group
True romance
Woman in the bushes
Apple sauce for Eve
The Book of Ruth and Naomi
Of the patience called forth by transition
I have always been poor at flirting
It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse
Your father’s fourth heart attack
Up and out
The task never completed
from WHAT ARE BIG GIRLS MADE OF?
What are big girls made of?
Elegy in rock, for Audre Lorde
All systems are up
For two women shot to death in Brookline, Massachusetts
A day in the life
The grey flannel sexual harassment suit
On guard
The thief
Belly good
The flying Jew
My rich uncle, whom I only met three times
Your standard midlife crisis
The visitation
Half vulture, half eagle
The level
The negative ion dance
The voice of the grackle
Salt in the afternoon
Brotherless one: Sun god
Brotherless two: Palimpsest
Brotherless three: Never good enough
Brotherless four: Liars dance
Brotherless five: Truth as a cloud of moths
Brotherless six: Unconversation
Brotherless seven: Endless end
from EARLY GRRRL
The correct method of worshipping cats
The well preserved man
Nightcrawler
I vow to sleep through it
Midsummer night’s stroll
The name of that country is lonesome
Always unsuitable
from THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY
The art of blessing the day
Learning to read
Snowflakes, my mother called them
On Shabbat she dances in the candle flame
In the grip of the solstice
Woman in a shoe
Growing up haunted
At the well
For each age, its amulet
Returning to the cemetery in the old Prague ghetto
The fundamental truth
Amidah: on our feet we speak to you
Kaddish
Wellfleet Shabbat
The head of the year
Breadcrumbs
The New Year of the Trees
Charoset
Lamb Shank: Z’roah
Matzoh
Maggid
Coming up on September
Nishmat
from COLORS PASSING THROUGH US
No one came home
Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps
One reason I like opera
My mother g
ives me her recipe
The good old days at home sweet home
The day my mother died
Love has certain limited powers
Little lights
Gifts that keep on giving
The yellow light
The new era, c. 1946
Winter promises
The gardener’s litany
Eclipse at the solstice
The rain as wine
Taconic at midnight
The equinox rush
Seder with comet
The cameo
Miriam’s cup
Dignity
Old cat crying
Traveling dream
Kamasutra for dummies
The first time I tasted you
Colors passing through us
from THE CROOKED INHERITANCE
Tracks
The crooked inheritance
Talking with my mother
Swear it
Motown, Arsenal of Democracy
Tanks in the streets
The Hollywood haircut
The good, the bad and the inconvenient
Intense
How to make pesto
The moon as cat as peach
August like lint in the lungs
Metamorphosis
Choose a color
Deadlocked wedlock
Money is one of those things
In our name
Bashert
The lived in look
Mated
My grandmother’s song
The birthday of the world
N’eilah
In the sukkah
The full moon of Nisan
Peace in a time of war
The cup of Eliyahu
The wind of saying
Some NEW POEMS
The low road
The curse of Wonder Woman
July Sunday at 10 a.m.
Football for dummies
Murder, unincorporated
The happy man
Collectors
First sown
Away with all that
All that remains
What comes next
Where dreams come from
The tao of touch
End of days
Dates of composition
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
INTRODUCTION
What’s the difference between the poetry in Circles on the Water, which summarized my first seven books, and this volume, which pulls some poems from the last nine? A lot has changed in almost thirty years. In 1982, I had already moved to Cape Cod and the natural world had begun to provide me with new, rich sources of imagery and experience. I am still politically engaged, as a feminist, as one concerned with environmental issues, with problems of health and aging, with equality and rights for all, with economic oppression, with various local issues—although perhaps a little more relaxed about politics in my social life. Nonetheless, my anger against those who consider themselves entitled to rights that they would deny to others has not diminished and I doubt ever will. Nor does my rage against those who use power to belittle, injure, or kill others whom they consider inferior to themselves.
In 1981, the first night of Hanukkah, my mother died, and for the next year I said Kaddish for her daily, as I do every year on her yahrzeit. I was saying gibberish because I had never been bat mitzvahed and knew no Hebrew. Needing to understand what I was saying for my mother, I began to learn at least enough to read and comprehend prayers. This began my reemergence into Judaism. I had begun to host seders for Pesach after the divorce from my second husband and to study the origins, history, and meaning of Pesach. Shortly afterward I entered into the never-ending process of writing my own haggadah, one poem, one passage at a time. [It’s still ongoing, for in spite of my writing Pesach for the Rest of Us, it will never be finished.] I was one of the founders of a havurah Am haYam, people of the sea, on the Outer Cape, a Jewish lay group, and one of the people who ran it for ten years. All of that brought new elements into my poetry. Through Kabbalah, I began to meditate. It keeps me from imploding.
The death of my mother dug a hole in my life and I have written about her suffering and hard life ever since. In some ways, hers is the face of the women I have fought for and written about. She is a frequent presence in my imagination and my memory. I have also returned frequently to my warm memories of my grandmother Hannah, who gave me my religious education and unconditional love. As I age, I have become aware of how much they gave me.
I married Ira Wood in 1982 after being in a relationship with him since 1976. While I had written considerable love poetry before, it was mostly poems of unhappy love, rocky affairs, longings unsatisfied. I began to write poems of fulfilled love and about the ongoing joys and problems of living monogamously through the years. I don’t believe I had ever before been happy in any intimate relationship for longer than a matter of days or weeks. I have never regretted my many experiences and adventures when I was in an open relationship, but it is certainly simpler and less demanding to be monogamous on those rare occasions when it actually works out. For us, it has. I think we are each other’s bashert. I cannot imagine being truly mated with anyone else over time. We still prefer talking with each other to anybody else.
As I grow older, I have had trouble with my eyes—cataracts and glaucoma and extreme myopia inherited from my parents—and my knees. I explore what aging means to me, how it actually happens to me. I have experienced the death of not only my parents and my brother but many friends. My own death has become far more real to me. That also has influenced my poetry. Death is not a sometime visitor but a kind of shadow.
Everything I learn and experience enriches my poetry, whatever its source.
I am an intellectually curious person. I do a great deal of research for my novels and my nonfiction works. Out of every epoch of history I study, out of every life and career I explore, poems issue—not from the narrative itself but from what I observe and learn. Whether it’s the French Revolution, appeals court, roses, herring, the origins of dates and almonds, my storehouse of imagery grows wider and deeper.
I first learned how American I am when I lived in France with my first husband. Since then I have continued to explore what this means, when I am so often at odds with the choices my government makes in this country and in the world outside of us. So often we are dangerous and destructive, and this consciousness is something that also informs my poetry.
I have explored my own childhood and adolescence far more as I age than I did when I was younger. In all of my last nine books, there are poems that deal with my formative years in Detroit, in my family, in the hood, among the friends and enemies I had then. Writing my memoir, Sleeping with Cats, forced me to return to many eras in my life that I had not entered in decades. It made my life far more vivid to me.
Ira, cats and the garden and local wildlife and the ocean and the seasons and the weather are part of the daily web of my life. As I write this, we have been snowed in for two days and cannot get out of our driveway. Hurricanes, nor’easters, ice storms, thunder and lightning, prolonged drought are events that impact us powerfully. My life is very different from that of most poets now because I do not have an affiliation with any college or university. I live as I can off my writing and gigs—readings, workshops, speeches, contests I judge, mini-residencies. I live in a village up close with nature in benign and hostile forms—my imposition of value on what simply is and what we have through our greed and carelessness caused. I live not with academics and writers as friends, although I have some of each, but in a locality where my friends are oystermen, a retired homicide detective, a retired OR nurse, carpenters, artists, a librarian, actors, a bank manager, a lawyer, a boat captain, a plumber. Ira Wood has been a selectman, one of the five people who run the town, for a number of years. That also brings us into contact with a wide range of people, both local and summer people. All of this feeds i
nto my poetry, and I believe it’s one of the reasons so many people can relate to what I write, as I hope you can. My poems read well aloud. I like to perform them. So do others. Naturally, I think I do it best.