What pieces of my life am I holding onto, dragging along on the journey because I am not worthy of them, and today is not special enough to use them? What vessel am I, useful and sturdy with a quiet beauty, or trying so hard to be something ornamental, that my bones will crack and all that is within dribble out, unused? The poetry of Marge Piercy is full of thought-provoking imagery, and it makes me laugh to imagine all of this in the old Norton Anthologies back at school. Did I ever really read these well?
“Putting the good things away”
In the drawer were folded fine
batiste slips embroidered with scrolls
and posies, edged with handmade
lace too good for her to wear.
Daily she put on schmatehs
fit only to wash the car
or the windows, rags
that had never been pretty
even when new: somewhere
such dresses are sold only
to women without money to waste
on themselves, on pleasure,
to women who hate their bodies,
to women whose lives close on them.
Such dresses come bleached by tears,
packed in salt like herring.
Yet she put the good things away
for the good day that must surely
come, when promises would open
like tulips their satin cups
for her to drink the sweet
sacramental wine of fulfillment.
The story shone in her as through
tinted glass, how the mother
gave up and did without
and was in the end crowned
with what? scallions? crowned
queen of the dead place
in the heart where old dreams
whistle on bone flutes,
where run-over pets are forgotten,
where lost stockings go?
In the coffin she was beautiful
not because of the undertaker’s
garish cosmetics but because
that face at eighty was still
her face at eighteen peering
over the drab long dress
of poverty, clutching a book.
Where did you read your dreams, Mother?
Because her expression softened
from the pucker of disappointment,
the grimace of swallowed rage,
she looked a white-haired girl.
The anger turned inward, the anger
turned inward, where
could it go except to make pain?
It flowed into me with her milk.
Her anger annealed me.
I was dipped into the cauldron
of boiling rage and rose
a warrior and a witch
but still vulnerable
there where she held me.
She could always wound me
for she knew the secret places.
She could always touch me
for she knew the pressure
points of pleasure and pain.
Our minds were woven together.
I gave her presents and she hid
them away, wrapped in plastic.
Too good, she said, too good.
I’m saving them. So after her death
I sort them, the ugly things
that were sufficient for every
day and the pretty things for which
no day of hers was ever good enough.
If no day is ever good enough… then what in life is a gift? But it’s easy to rationalize this one… We’re not going anywhere special, why bother? A bitterness, a cynicism, a laissez-faire becomes a way of life so easily.
To Be Of Use
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
“To be of use” by Marge Piercy © 1973, 1982.
From CIRCLES ON THE WATER © 1982 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Middlemarsh, Inc.
First published in Lunch magazine. Used by permission of Wallace Literary Agency.