Ganymede

The following poem is the first of three poems that comprise a "prequel" to Homer's Iliad. Don't be daunted: this is a love poem about a young man abducted by an eagle, who turns out to the the Olympian god Zeus. Ovid devotes only a few stanzas to this story, one of the most-painted and most-sculpted episodes in all Greek Myth. It is related to Troy, since the boy's father is the precursor of the Kings of Troy. I weave it all together in a Shelleyan manner. This was published in 1991, and when it appeared in a British magazine, the journal was seized by the authorities. For the upcoming 20th Anniversary edition of my book, Poems from Providence, I have revised the Ganymede poems. Here is Part One, which stands alone as a rhapsodic poem about the Alternate Lifestyles of the Gods. By the way, the Greeks approved of this kind of behavior and emulated it: although Zeus's girlfriends were usually hunted down by jealous Hera and either killed or turned into animals or inanimate objects, Ganymede is still up there, the favored cup-bearer, known to us as "Aquarius."

1

Night after night the pack of wolves came down

to stalk and ravage the peaceful flocks. Rams

fled and bellowed, ewes wailed while white lambs fell

and blood, black in the moonlight, stained the rocks.

Teeth gnashed at tender necks, bellies gave way

to serpent-sprawling innards, torn apart.

Dark silhouettes dragged limbs, ribs and gore

off to their own awaiting young ones. “Likos!”
the wolf-cry, made the blood run cold,

“Likos” made mothers reach for children,

elders to run for gorse-piles to increase

the fire that kept the hungry ones at bay.

At dawn, in cover of iron-gray clouds,

the men set out to find the lupine lairs,

hoping to slay the mothers and cubs,

then track and destroy the rest of the pack.

Never had so many wolves run wild;

never had so many flocks ’round Ilion
suffered such losses repeatedly,
as though a new kind of night-beast,
wily as man himself, strode on long legs,
feeding with jaws that never seemed
to fill a belly, as though they killed for sport,

Likos, then, or likanthropos —
the wolves that once were human?

The chief's son, young Ganymede,

too young to hunt, too gentle and kind

for the ways of killing,

remained at the shelter-cave with the women.

Tros took his nephews,

leaving his own son to guard the clan mothers,

the virgin sisters, the incoherent babes.
One torch at cave-mouth would be enough,
for no beast dared a burning brand.

All day, no enemies appeared.

Had not his mother thirsted for spring-fresh

water, had she not sent him with empty pouch

to the hillside source

(oh, as she later rued it!)

nothing might have happened.

But one low-hanging cloud which spread

from Ilion’s walls to these high shepherd crags

was no mere storm — it was a god,

the dozing presence of Zeus himself,

who sometimes sleepwalks, unmoored from Olympus,

drifting from Hellas to the ends of Ocean,

or grazing the firetips of spouting Oeta,

or waking at the bruise of Caucasus,

scattering beneficent rain and the random strokes

of hubris-guided fire to some impious target.

Had not the thunder god awakened then

and seen the slender boy, filling the pouch

from the patient trickle of rock-pure water

(oh, how they wept and rued it!)

nothing might have happened.

2

The boy felt the tense of lightning poise.

His reddish hair stood on the nape of his neck,

his ivory skin, his eye-whites luminous.

He froze when the cloud unveiled itself —

A terrible eye regarded him

     from the black moil of suspended rain —

a place of cerulean blue, windless and calm,

the all-perceiving eye of the son of Cronus.

In one rock-rending thunderclap

     the heavens shattered.

The bowl of sky-clouds spiraled in,

the self-annihilating storm

consumed itself —

3

                    For that immaterial

blink-out the heir of Titans nearly ceased:

the strength to make a storm

was but the night sweat of his stupor,

the strength to stop one

a nearly impossible act of will

for even the hoary father of Olympus.

He caught his breath, feared

that the quake might tremble the arms

suspending the Earth from Chaos —

And then he hovered there, vast hawk

over hapless sparrow, assuming eagle spread

and talon grasp to assure the taking.

He pitied the tiny boy, frozen in his shadow.

No one had ever done this to Zeus —

no love at first sight for Io and Semele

(the prayers of suitors to Eros had scented

them out and lured a curious deity,

misunderstood by goddesses, to sample

the charms of mortal womanhood.)

But this was only a shepherd boy,

sprung from the loins of the chieftain Tros,

unsung in any lover’s plea, a boy

whose beauty would bloom

for an instant as dew on hyacinth

or frost upon a frozen bowl —

a face, an eye, a cheek, a brow

so great as to transfix the storm

and make the mid-day Phaeton

     stumble in his headlong course.

Beauty too soft for marble, subtle for wood,

too unrepeatable to risk to memory,

too human to transform to star or shrubbery:

Ganymede, a happy accident of nature,

spared by the Fates until this imperious peak

of his brief, unnoticed existence.

4

It was worth the wrath of Hera

and the mockery of the wine-drunk gods.

“Zeus with a boy? A stripling boy!

Poor child, he’ll waste away on arid Olympus,

turn to a withered ancient while Zeus

forgets him in one of his longer slumbers.”

To their astonishment, the Titan forfeits sleep,

sends to the boy each dawn a cup

of nectar and a slice of Pomona’s apples.

5

He summons the troupe of ageless gods,

puts on his grey-beard visage and says:

“None but Ganymede shall bear this cup,

none but Ganymede shall serve me wine,

     and his the hands that pour clear water.

None but Ganymede shall turn the clouds

on which I rest and forge my thunder.

One tithe of my lot of immortal life I give

so that this boy will never age. His voice

will stay at the threshold of manhood,

his locks unshorn, his beard withheld.

He shall not shed even the salt of a tear,

immutable in my affections, semidivine,

safe from the envy of goddesses.

Let him attend me always.”

As seal of his oath, great Zeus displays

the form of Ganymede among the elder worlds,

joining the sun-path zodiac, the faithful boy,

star-striding Aquarius.

6

Ganymede feared the eagle.

He was relieved when great Zeus came to him

as the gray-beard god, almost a grandfather.

He came again in shepherd’s robes,

younger by decades than before, hugged him

with great arms like a loving father.

Zeus laughed, then leaped into a waiting cloud,

his ever-ready tapestries and anterooms.

That night, he returned to the boy

     as a handsome youth,

fringed with first beard, tightened

     with muscle on arm and calf.

The boy did not resist, but let his hand

touch the hard lines of the lover’s chest,

slipped to his knees in terror and awe,

not breathing when the athlete’s body

     covered him,

thrilled with the priapic thrust against

     his loins,

not caring that a seedburst could cinder him,

not fearing the rending of flesh by godhood.

And there was no pain — the ardent god

gave him, and took, a thousand pleasure strokes,

and every one was joy to both of them.

No one has ever been raped by a god.

7

Zeus steals again to look at the sleeping boy.

At last there is a question he cannot answer,

a riddle whose solving no manner of trickery

or Titan bluster can achieve. He asks himself:

Suppose I withhold a month of apples

from Ganymede? Suppose I let him age

just that much more? It maddens me

to hold a perfect Ganymede if Ganymede

plus Time were yet more perfect still.

The god turns sleepless on his mountain peak,

frozen between beauty and a mystery.

8

Ganymede thinks only of Zeus.

No one could imagine a greater joy.

And yet his delicate fingers shake

as he takes the green-peeled apple.

He puts it down on the golden tray,

looks at his blushing cheeks

     reflected there,

his hair still tousled by passion,

his lesser size, his frailer limbs.

He wonders: if I refuse the gift,

and let but one day’s aging pass.

If I were older, fuller, stronger —

would Zeus love me better?

The boy turns sleepless in his sheltered bed,

frozen between love and uncertainty.

9

Hera paces outside the banquet hall.

Each night the men gods revel there:

Hephaestus, Apollo, blood-stained Ares,

Hades with his burning gaze, tide-worn

     Poseidon.

Each night they sing more merrily,

trade dangerous boasts about the Titan wars

as if Tartarus held no sleepers,

wax even stronger in their tales of love

for maids, and goddesses — and mortal boys.

Each night they leave, brawling with shields

and swords and tridents and staffs,

down to the waiting chariot hall,

until the room holds none but Zeus and Ganymede,

Ganymede and Zeus. For months, the goddesses

have been ignored and shunned.

Now Hera, the lawful mistress of marriages,

of love and hearth-fire parentage,

is banished to the kitchen of the gods,

the weaving room, the tending

of her temples. How long, she asks,

how long will this Olympian dalliance

preoccupy the lord of the gods?

10

I like to think of the gods still banqueting,

how they all came to love young Ganymede,

how Zeus neglected his Olympian rites

and ceased to trouble with the squabbling of gods.

I like to think of this summer storm

as the rolling of cloud from their lovers’ bed,

as the never-tiring spark of their passion

rejuvenates this earth of forgotten temples.

I like to think of a joy that never dies,

of a beauty that never fades,

of a god’s love transforming a boy,

of all manner of love enthroned

     and noble at last,

of love oaths written with stars.

11

I stand in the sorrowing wastes of Ilion.

By an eternal spring, I raise my cup,

in the shade of a lonely apple tree.

An eagle takes wing from a distant crag.

My heart cries: Ganymede!

The House by the Coke Ovens

I saw my childhood home only one time between the ages of 13 and last fall: I was 35 and was driven through Scottdale PA hastily and out into the country to find the house by the coke ovens. Here is a revision of the poem I wrote that summer, from a cycle that uses the Native American "God's Eye" and wild berries as recurring motifs.

I wanted to see my childhood home again,

the country house, the demon-haunted

rooms that gave my inner self their imprint.

We drove through Scottdale with its too

many churches, stores boarded up, cold

as an exhausted and empty mine.
         Looking for Carpentertown,

we drove back and forth in the hollow,

passing again and again the barren, black

lot by the edge of the fen. “Stop here,”

I said. “This is the place. The house

stood here. Back there, coke ovens blazed

all night, and there, the trucks

ground by with their tons of coal.”

Of the house that stood here — nothing.

Of the solemn poplars of Lombardy

     that wrote on my window panes — nothing.

Of the stately porch and its swing,

     the apple tree’s promise — nothing.

Of the locked, steep attic and its

     imagined relics  — nothing.

Of the deep, deep cellar with its

     warden rats – nothing.

Of the cool spring house and its poisoned well —

     nothing.

Of the very stone and shape of foundation,

     the lineament of property — nothing.

Am I seeing the future? Is carboned ground

a resonant prophecy of bomb-fall —

is this desolation my past – or a future

of our own time sewn with apocalypse?

(The God’s Eye blinks but cannot answer.)

A neighbor comes to tell us the house 

burned to the ground some fifteen years ago.

The timbers and bricks were trucked away.

Slag dumps drifted, quicksand consumed,

until the foundation itself was buried.

Trees tumbled to ruffian winds.
 

And as for the “quicksand”

I thought I remembered, the local said:

“Oh yes, out there in the middle,

there are bad places. Last spring it got

our grandma: she was in past her knees

when we heard her screaming and pulled her out.”

We walk where the house was,

where it seems dry and safe enough.

Breaking through black-crust earth

the stalks of lichens, brittle, rigid,

stand at attention with lurid caps

of crimson. (The field guide shows them,

and says they are called British Soldiers.)

They rise like the whiskers of a Chthonic god,

eyeless guardians of a plain of night,

a carpet for Gorgons and barefoot Maenads,

dry to the touch, coarse as sandstone.

Only their form suggests the organic.

Concealing the lichens, as forest hides shrubs,

I see a tangled maze of blackberries,

thorns guarding the fruit with jealous teeth.

Although they hang at arm’s length, ripe

for the taking, although the sickly birds

glare down from a chancred tree, no one

will pick this fruit. It too is black —

coal dust, charcoal, coke and obsidian,

a berry hued for the Stygian shores,

for the lips of the dead and the damned.

I played here as a child, amid the thorns

and poison ivy. The earth did not open

to swallow me. Perhaps I am immune,

the one, who remembering, belongs.

There is not much left of the great coke industry,

when the coal was eked from nearby Hecla

and the smouldering coke went to Pittsburgh.

A quarter mile back, the red rust scavenges

the twisted wheel of a coal crusher,

its chute and trestle and engine works gone;

it lays like the useless jaw of a dinosaur.

Open hearth ovens sprout vengeful trees,

vine roots split mortar, firebrick moults clay.

“I lived here many years ago,” I said —

not saying how many. It was thirty —

I was five when this house protected me,

when its terrors wrote themselves upon me.

And so the hungry past steals up behind me,

a lumbering truck full of fossils,

heating my poems to the red fury of ovens,

erasing my life as quickly as I write it.

Midsummer Night

I am well-met by moonlight:

Bats line the graveyard trees,

   hanging from pine and maple boughs.

   Not hundreds of bats,

          but thousands —

Their slant inverted eyes regard me.

  In their world I’m the strange one,

   a two-leg walker

     stuck to the ground,

dim-sighted, inarticulate,

deaf to their ultrasonic Sanskrit.

I love their wing-beats, their

startled flight when I clap my hands —

their comradeship for my monologues,

their brotherly listening —

And though they darken the trees

so the beacon moon,

the stars cannot intrude,

fireflies assemble

like landing lights,

my faerie pathway clearly marked

into the grove and the elder gravestones,

out to the lake and the quiet streets,

or — to nowhere

I can remain as their midsummer king,

a willing captive of Mab or Oberon,

regent of their passing luminance,

crowned in an aureole of foxfire

for this night of nights,
      summer's briefest,

its joys packed frenzied, feverish,

from long-drawn dusk till

     teasing dawn

when bat-wings fold invisible

into the foliage and the ill-met

day people rise from their beds,

cock-crow, and  assume their power.

Keep me now and forever,

     Thou sable Night!

Hearing the Wendigo

All the Native Americans from Appalachia to the Hudson Bay in Canada share a common dread of an elemental creature comprised entirely of wind. Algernon Blackwood documented the myth in in horror tale, "The Wendigo." Wendigo stories have been campfire horror tales for generations, embellished with each telling. I first wrote about the Wendigo in 1989, and I have mentioned it in several other poems. Here is the original in a new revision, suitable considering all the tornadoes we have had lately.

HEARING THE WENDIGO

There is a place

     where the winds meet howling

cold nights in frozen forest

     snapping the tree trunks

     in haste for their reunion.

Gone is the summer they brooded in,

     gone the autumn of their awakening.

Now at last they slide off glaciers,

     sail the spreading ice floes,

     hitch a ride with winter.

Great bears retreat and slumber,

     owls flee

          and whippoorwills shudder.

Whole herds of caribou

     stampede on the tundra

     in the madness of hunger,

     the terror of thunder-winds..

The snow-piled Huron packs tight
     the animal skins around his doorway,
hopes his small fire and its thin smoke
escape the notice of boreal eyes.
He will not look out at the night sky,
     for fear of what might look back.

Only brave Orion witnesses

     as icy vectors collide in air.

Trees break like tent poles,

     earth sunders to craters

     beneath the giant foot-stamps.

Birds rise to whirlwind updraft

     and come down bones and feathers.

I have not seen the Wendigo —
     (I scarcely dare to name it!) —

     the wind’s collective consciousness,

     id proud and hammer-hard.

To see is to be plucked

     into the very eye of madness.

Yet time and again as I walked here,
     alone in the snow
     by this solitary and abandoned lake,
I have felt its upward urge

     like hands beneath my shoulders,

     lifting and beckoning.

It says, You dream of flying?

     Then fly with me!

I answer No,

not with your hungry eye above me,

not with those teeth like roaring chain saws,

not with those pile-driving footsteps —

Like the wise Huron sachem,
     the long-gone Erie, the Mingo,
     the Seneca, the Onondaga,
like all Hodenosaunee-born,

     I too avert my eyes

     against the thing that summons me.

Screaming, the airborne smiter

     rips off the tops of conifers,

crushes a row of power-line towers,

peppers the hillside with saurian tracks,

then leaps straight up at the Dog Star,

as though its anger could crack the cosmos,

as though the sky bowl were not infinite,

and wind alone could touch the stars

     and eat them.

Op. 525, 1989
Rev 2011 as Op. 856

Sleeping with Thor

There might as well be a neon sign outside
that flashes “Vacancy,” for all the talk I get from you.
Your great blond hulk beside me, breathing,
that one arm holding me, tight as a battle trophy:
all fine and good. Dane, or Viking, or as you joked
when you dragged me back here, “The great God Thor
in exile from Asgard,” your open mouth is wordless,
as animal slumber, not quite a snore but a rumble
rolls over me. At the foot of the bed, your sandals,
somewhere safely off, that hammer named Mjolnir
that I think means more to you than boyfriends:
all fine. I should just relax and enjoy this, but for
the fact that you are sleeping with both eyes open
and I am staring into two tenantless holes where once
those commanding blue orbs had sundered my resistance.

Twice you have stirred, and wordless, twice
we have done everything you thought I wanted — god,
things I never even dreamt of! Even with all that armor on,
each touch was just at the cusp between joy and too much
to bear. If that was mead we drank, I’ll toast the maker,
but must I go eyeless too into some zombie slumber?

Are you in Asgard, where Odin even now scolds you
for your college-boy dalliance? Remember to tell him
I am a poet, and a fit companion and confidant!
Your strong hand will not release me; clad
in the tatters of what you tore from me, I must wait
for the next installment, or canto, or conquest.

Are you in and out of yourself as it conveniences?
Those blue eyes drilled me, as you enjoyed the spoils
of my all too easy surrender. But what I win
is this manikin semblance of a lover,
the fox’s calling card, a henhouse full of carnage
and a room chill-blasted with Arctic air.
(Good trick, since it is July outside.)

If you are phantom, a frosty incubus,
perhaps the rest of you will follow your errant eyes.
I will wake then, embracing a suit of armor,
a limp red cape and leggings.

I’ll look down empty corridors of clothes, find no one

either up your sleeves or down your trousers, the shape
of your strong legs only an imprint on the mattress.

If I reach in those vacant sockets, I’d feel my fingers touch.
I’d know the embrace that holds me was death’s rigor;
I’d feel for the cold hand inside the chain-mail glove:
try as I might for a pulse I'd find none. I’d dare
to place my lips to yours, expecting no respiration.

Dark raven wings flutter.
I think I hear a distant wind, a sigh between your ears
and mine. Perhaps it comes from Asgard, perhaps
you ride the Bifrost to return to me. Can I be bard
to your impossible beauty? Or when those eyes
assume their blueness, will the only words you mutter
be something about hockey practice, too much to drink,
and the need for a serious breakfast?

I expect nothing. I tell myself
I imagined most of this. But there,
the armored breastplate presses me still from behind,
and that arm refuses to release me,
and there, next to our hastily thrown off jackets,
reposes Mjolnir, the square-ended hammer of Thor.

The Vanished Chapel

I returned to Edinboro PA last fall for the first time in years, and found that the Episcopal Center, in whose garret I had lived, had utterly vanished. I had written about the place in a poem called "Seeds from My Garden," in which I counseled my successor tenant in gardening. But seeing the building itself gone made me reflect deeper, and the rewritten poem is very different, and more revealing. (It's amazing I wasn't burned at the stake in that town!)

THE VANISHED CHAPEL

Back for a holiday some years ago, I visited

my home, that old Episcopal chapel,
whose attic garret I lived in
(scandal unheard-of in those days,
an atheist-poet-pervert
doing who knows what under the eaves)

I conduct the new tenant over the grounds,
say, “Here are the onions, back
from last year — I planted these.
A little ground fire in spring
will weed through those blackberries,
in summer they’ll go to eight feet.
The sod here is cleared, for last summer
I took shovel and planted peas, lettuce,

carrot, red radish. Rabbits, oh yes,
they ate the peas right down to the ground.
A sour kind of clover, oxalis I think it’s called,
grows here on the lawn,
boon to salads. Wild flowers,
good for a week in the house.”

(By the wall, a garrulous stalk,
alien seed pods clumped in the sun,
six feet of rhubarb — don’t know
who planted the stuff. Even the kids

     keep away, too much
resemblance to Body Snatcher pods.)

A year passed.
The tenant was gone, they told me.
The grocer’s kind,
     he ate no onions, left
     the berries for birds;

They covered the lot with deep gravel,
     for cars.

Decades passed. I came again
and hardly recognized the spot.
The chapel fell to ruin, then burned.
The garden is a weed-lot. Trees,
already thick and sturdy, assert
the primacy of forest. One more place
I have lived in, obliterated. How long
did the chapel stand empty, shunned,
the object of lingering rumors
of things that went on in that attic?
How many come back, to look and remember,
not the Episcopal mumbling
that went on downstairs, but the mad
poetic ramblings and strange seductions
that nearly rove the roof off as Wagner
and Shostakovich and Mahler rattled
the windows and sent the single bat
(too poor for a belfry) helter skelter
then out the open casement?
No need for hauntings
when you have poets in the attic!

Hawkflight

A revision of one of my earliest extant poems. Gloomy adolescent infatuation, ah!

HAWKFLIGHT

The place I fell in love

with you was not a place at all:
it was a chasm whose entryway
was two black eyes.
I fell there and found you, Hawk.

When, after many refusals
you finally permitted me to hold you,
your wings were laden with nettles.
Perhaps you needed me to remove them,
to speak comforting words, to assure you
of a beauty you did not know you possessed.

Still your feathered breast resisted me,

     aspired to the dark flight

     against a sky of no stars --

You flew, o into blackness,

infinity your satellite and silhouette.

The same moment I rejoiced in possessing you,
I saw you move away in sadness.

Each time my hand,

was permitted to caress you,

your wings stirred skyward

at the hint of dawn.

                     My arms,

acquired wings, too, a mantle of despair
that only let me plummet downward.

Striving to reach you,

I fell deadweight at the black limn'd

          treetop.

          You soaring,

I a world-bound Leonardo

tracing the the arc of your envied ascent
as I sank into my own abyss of longing.

You circled. You returned.
One thunderstruck night
you thrust your beak
into my open window,
fluttered as though by right
to the foot of my bed.
Assuming that native form
that could always seduce me,
you pressed yourself against me
and offered everything
if I would forsake all
to follow you. And yes, I said yes,
for the proof of love is this:
if you love someone
you will go anywhere
to be with him. Anywhere.

I was this foolish once.
I have been this foolish each time
beauty coins words
it thinks I want to hear.

Somewhere, amid the mountains
that separate us, you have your eyrie,
the lone crag of your solitude.
Your days have been busy.
You have your pride, and your prey.
I do not think of you much.
I have my pride,
and five hundred poems.

Sentences

The original of this poem was written during the Vietnam War. It fell under my pen again tonight for a touch-up, as fresh as ever.

SENTENCES

the army came home,
to parade on the soft graves
of the war dead.
the general faced the orphan child
with his little folded flag
and had nothing to say.
the universe stopped
while something that called itself god
pondered the full implications of his beliefs.
in January, a fresh-baked doughnut
crystallizes in the cold air
before you can finish eating it.
the stringy-haired girl who told me
“just pray and God will grant your wishes”
made me laugh as I thought
of my stepfather eaten by oversized rats.
does the great eagle know
that its eggs will not hatch?
yes we will over your dead body.

About Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy came to Providence last April to judge the Philbrick Poetry Prize and to read from her work. I had the honor of introducing her, but did not know, to my regret, that she hates being introduced by people who quote from her work. So, my sincere and well-prepared remarks about this significant poet were somewhat curtailed. I just came across the text and thought I would share it, since Marge Piercy's work is truly outstanding. I know that our devoted poetry audience in Providence had gone out to the local bookstores and gobbled up every Piercy book they could find in anticipation of the event. So should you.

When I said, again and again to our judging committee and to various friends, “Marge Piercy.” I was told, “Watch out! She’s fierce! She has three husbands, lives on a compound with 120 cats and a pride of lions. She’ll snap your head off.” I said, “Now that’s the kind of poet I want to meet!” back in the early 1970s, when I started my little press in New York City, I published mostly women poets, and all of them, young and old, were always carrying Marge Piercy books around with them. They connected with her in an intense way: a female writer who, at an early point in her career, had “arrived” in a way that women accepted and admired, and which men acknowledged with the grudging admission that she did everything as well as, or better than, they did.

Along the way, Marge Piercy moved from being “that poet that women read and cling to” to a poet everyone read, and a novelist whose books you couldn’t put down. She rip-roared into science fiction, a veritable boy’s club, and made her mark there, along with Ursula LeGuin and the woman who called herself “James Tiptree, Jr.”

The poet is always the outsider. “When I flirt I feel like an elephant/ in a pink tutu balancing on a beach ball,/ a tabby wearing a doll’s dress.” Elsewhere she describes herself as a young girl:

I did not want to be a boy. Most
of them were imbeciles, I thought,
nor did I want to be a girl or woman.
Maybe I would grow up to be a cat.
Maybe I was an alien, a changeling.

She is a satirist worthy of the Roman Juvenal, often at her best when turning her focus on her own gender. She can mock women with giant purses, “women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders” but there is self mockery when she Whitman-lists the purse’s contents: “Ten pens, because the ink may run out … maps, a notebook in case” Of course only a writer would say this! “Women like kangaroos with huge purses bearing hidden  / our own helplessness and it s fancied cures.” When she mocks “The Beauty Myth” she describes “hair like a museum piece, daily/ ornamented with ribbons, vases,/ grottoes, mountains, frigates in full/ sail, balloons. Baboons, the fancy/ of a hairdresser turned loose” and reminds us “It is not for male or female dogs ... that poodles are clipped … to topiary hedges.” “If I had a $400 haircut,” she asks, “would people buy calendars just me on every month grinning?” Satire is an unlicensed firearm. When she writes about horrible gifts no one wants to receive and which no one can get rid of, she might have inspired,or may have been inspired by, the wicked Edward Gorey cartoon that shows Edwardian ice skaters hurling wrapped objects into a hole in the ice. The caption: “FRUITCAKE.”

Those wonderful flarings-up, as she confesses “but oh, oh, in me/ lurks a tyrant with a double-edged ax who longs/ to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand/ and shriek, You Shall Do As I Say, pig bastards”. She can say, on spying an ex in a supermarket, “Now I could walk through him like smoke/ and only sneeze.” On the arrogance of America invading everybody: “The harder you push, the harder what you never bothered to notice pushes back.” On same-sex marriage: “In earlier times and different cultures and tribes, men married men and women married women, and the sky never fell …” On the Patriot Act, which results in an FBI interrogation, “collected receipts from your/ restaurant meals for the past five years. You have ordered hummus six times, falafel twice and lamb four times. … Welcome to the Inquisition!” In a poignant little grouping called “No one came home,” she recalls the horror and emptiness of never knowing what become of a loved one, from a single lost cat, to the thousands in Argentina “disappeared” by their own government. Her poem, “Buyer Beware,” on the cost of war, should be pinned to the lapels of certain former government officials should anyone have the god fortune to arrest them.

I love her poem about opera, the most artificial and intense of all art forms.  No skinny blonds here, she tells us: “The heroine is fifty and weighs/ as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins. She could crack our jaw in her fist. She can hit high C lying down.”

But who also comes to the peace and calm of rituals, of the year’s turning points, to the outer skin of ancestry we all wear and cannot really put off, coming home to her own Jewish heritage but in her own words, who can invert the old rabbinic saying of “Thank God I was not born a woman,” with  “Thank God I was.”

A social poet too, able to compress the evils of society into just a few words. Leaving urban Detroit, her family sold the house to a black family. The consequence, Piercy writes: “my old boyfriend next door poisoned/ my cat … It took him all night to die.” She writes of a women working in a women’s clinic,. Threatened with murder every day by an anonymous phone caller. Our penchant as a species to invent tortures made her write “We could erect a Smithsonian of pain’s / little helpers, racks, prods, all the mechanical, electrical, computerized/ vehicles for imposing hostile will.” When Piercy recalls, in detail, a Detroit neighbor who brutally beat his wife and children every payday, and how no one did anything about it because half the other neighbor men did the same, or worse, she packs the poetic payload of the poem into the title, “Family Values.”

She is a nature poet, proving that poets see, and know the names of things. “I can get drink on color, lured like a bee/ to drench myself in reds and blues and purples,” she says. She writes of Cape Cod, her adopted home since 1971, with the enraptured eye of the newcomer, the naturalist, the seeker. “Voice of the Grackle.” “A Long and Busy Night” “Tracks”  “Crow Babies.” Her poem, “The Rush at Equinox”, free as it is, is as compressed and cogent as the best of Robert Frost. Yet she does not flinch at nature’s cruel side. She knows her cat has gone to the coyote’s dinner, that life eats life, and that animals do not run about in Disney costumes. Writing of our mammal cousins, the great whales, she says “Each is a poet, a composer, a scholar of the roads/ below. They are always singing, and what they know/ is as alien to us as if they swim past Sirius.”

Writing of her mother’s death, she makes no claim to prophecy or premonition, an uncanny modesty for a poet. “That day,” she recalls, “opened like any ordinary can of tomatoes. … I was caught by surprise/ like the trout that takes the fly/ and I gasped in the fatal air.” Death seems repeatedly to arrive by surprise in Piercy’s poems, as when she encounters a wounded and drying deer, “the thing that strikes in the middle of the morning.” Even the Holocaust, which many of us feel compelled to document from its obscure origins to the last detailed survivor’s memory, sweeps across her poems like a whirlwind:

I remember my grandmother’s cry
when she learned the death of all she had
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed…

Piercy resists death: “I go to charm death like Sheherezade / with stories I refuse to end until my wish is granted.”

There are some poets we know, and whom we trust to take us through pain and anger and loss, because they come to tell truth, to shed light on the dark inside us, ultimately, to heal. Piercy’s older brother, her Everyman, refused to read her poems of childhood memories. We can and must. What does she tell us when she recounts the Detroit father beating his wife and children, and everyone looking the other way?

That so long as we do so on the minutest level – person to person, man to woman, parent to child – then we shall continue to do as much, or worse to anyone we deem the Other.

If Piercy were only a social and political poet, we would owe her a great debt, but I am glad that she dwells in a place where sea and sun and all of nature fill her palette as well. Like Robinson Jeffers on the west coast, she embraces the long arc of geologic and ocean time and sees us a part of an animal spectrum.

Seldom it is that a poet knows, at the beginning of a career, the solemn mission ahead. Marge Piercy wrote,sometime before 1969, the last lines of her collection, Hard Loving:

It is time to loosen and make new.

We are sacs of mad cells that have forgotten how to grow.

It is time to close ourselves to the steel probes

of the corporate generals and devisers.

It is time to open ourselves to the other with respect …

Time to learn we are part of one wave and each other.

Sisters and brothers in movement,

we carry the wet cuneiform of proteins

the long history of working to be human …

We must be healed at last to our soft bodies

and our hard planet

to make live and conscious history in common.