Poem of the Day

Let’s hope this marks my return to consistency with the PotD. Thanks to everyone who has suggested poems. Look for them in the days to come. I’ve been saving this poem and it’s quite appropriate for this time of year, I think. I’ve been cooking/baking lots of delicacies containing squash!

Look what my cousin brought when she and her husband came for dinner. She claimed they were “awash in squash”. Then my mom brought another huge zucchini and a yellow squash.

Attack of the squash people
By Marge Piercy

And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.

They’re coming, they’re on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped with cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.

Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.

Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people’s gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.

With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.

I still have quite a few of Marge Piercy’s poems in my file, and I haven’t posted one of hers in a while. So today’s choice was easy.

Arriving
By Marge Piercy

People often labor to attain
what turns out to be an entrance
to a small closet
or a deep pit
or sorrow like a toothache of the brain.

I wanted you. I fought you
for yourself, I wrestled
to open you, I hung on.
I sat on my love as on the lid
of a chest holding a hungry bear.
You were what I wanted: you
still are. Now my wanting
feeds on success and grows,
a cowbird chick in a warbler’s
nest, bigger by the hour, bolder
and louder, screeching and gaping
for more, flapping bald wings.

I am ungainly in love as a house
dancing. I am a factory chimney
that has learned to play Bach
like a carillon. I belch rusty
smoke and flames and strange music.
I am a locomotive that wants
to fly to the moon.

I should wear black
on black like a Greek village woman,
making signs against the evil eye
and powder my head white. Though I try
to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire
on a mountain, and tomorrow
and the next day make me shudder
equally with hope and fear.

Now that I live in the country with a large yard and lots of plants, I’m more aware of things like spiders, of which I’ve never been fond. Yesterday there was one crawling on the bunch of lilacs on my dining room table, and I didn’t even kill it. (Big step for me, as one of my greatest fears is waking up with something crawling on me.)

Argiope
By Marge Piercy

Your web spans a distance
of two of my hands spread
turning the space between unrelated
uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn
stalks into a frame. The patterned web
startles me, as if a grasshopper
spoke, as if a moth whispered.
The bold design cannot have
a predatory use: no fly,
no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag
as my gaze is. Thin I see you,
big, much bigger than I feel
spiders ought to be. Black and gold
you are a shiny brooch with legs
of derricks. I remind you
I am a general friend to your
kind. I rescue your kinfolk
from the bathtub fall mornings
before I run the water. I
remind you nervously we are
artisans, we both make out
of what we take in and what
we pass through our guts a patterned
object slung on the world.
I detour your net carefully
picking my way through the
pumpkin vines. The mother
of nightmares fatal and hungry,
you kill for a living. Beauty
is only a sideline, and your mate
approaches you with infinite
caution or you eat him too.
You stare at me, you do not
scuttle or hide, you wait.
I go round and leave you mistress
of your territory, not in
kindness but in awe. Stay
out of my dreams, Hecate
of the garden patch, Argiope.

I still have quite a few of Marge Piercy’s poems in my file…

Waiting outside
By Marge Piercy

All day you have been on my mind,
a seagull perched on an old wharf
piling by the steely grip of its claws,
shrieking when any other comes too near,
waiting for fish or what the tide brings,
shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

All day you have been on my mind,
a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit
with a perky veil scratching my cheek,
with a feather hanging down like a broken
tail tickling my neck, settling its
big dome over my ears muffling sounds.

All day you have been on my mind,
a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,
wind off the Sahara bearing bad
news and sand that stifles, roaring
through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,
a helmet that clamps me here to bake.

All day you have been on my mind,
a steam iron pressing the convolutions
from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying
cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable
with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow
furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

Here’s another one from Piercy. I love her descriptions in this poem and I was astounded when I got to the end and realized how incredibly true her observation was. This poem was also in The Moon is Always Female.

The doughty oaks
By Marge Piercy

Oaks don’t drop their leaves
as elms and lindens do.
They evolved no corky layer,
no special tricks.
They shut off the water.
Leaves hang on withering
tougher than leather.
Wind tears them loose.

Slowly they grow, white oaks
under the pitch pines,
tap roots plunging
deep, enormous carrots.
By the marsh they turn
twisting, writhing
aging into lichens, contorted
like the wind solidified.

In the spring how stubborn
how cautious
clutching their wallets tight.
Long after the maples,
the beeches have leafed out
they sleep in their ragged leaves.
Reluctantly in the buzz and hum
they raise velvet
antlers flushed red,
then flash silvery tassels.
At last vaulted
green chambers of summer.

Ponderous, when mature, as elephants,
in the storm they slam castle doors.
They all prepare to be great
grandfathers, in the meantime
dealing in cup and saucer acorns.

When frost crispens the morning,
they give up nothing willingly.
Always fighting the season,
conservative, mulish.
I find it easy to admire in trees
what depresses me in people.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

I’m reading The Moon is Always Female by Marge Piercy and it’s wonderful. Here’s a sample. (I’m hording up a number of other poems to post in the future, too.)

Intimacy
By Marge Piercy

Why does my life so often
feel like a slither of entrails
pouring from a would in my belly?
With both my hands I grasp
my wet guts, trying to force
them back in.
                      Why does my life
so often feel like a wild
black lake under the midnight
thunder where I am drowning,
waves crashing over my face
as I try to breathe.
                               Why
does my life feel like a war
I am fighting alone? Why are
you fighting me? Why aren’t
you with me? If I die this instant
will you be more content
with the morning news?
Will your coffee taste better?
I am not your fate. I am not your government.
I am not your FBI. I am not
even your mother, not your father
or your nightmare or your health.
I am not a fence, not a wall.
I am not the law or the actuarial tables
of your insurance broker. I am
a woman with my guts loose
in my hands, howling and it is not
because I committed hara-kiri.
I suggest either you cook me
or sew me back up. I suggest you walk
into my pain as into the breaking
waves of an ocean of blood, and either
we will both drown or we will
climb out together and walk away.