Free Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy

living
    resembles a straight line,
    certainly not this journey
    to and fro, zigzagging
    you there and me here
    making our own road onward
    as the snail does.
    Yes, for some time we might contemplate
    not the tiger, not the eagle or grizzly
    but the snail who always remembers
    that wherever you find yourself eating
    is home, the center
    where you must make your love,
    and wherever you wake up
    is here, the right place to be
    where we start again.

Councils
    (for two voices, female and male)
We must sit down
and reason together.
We must sit down.
Men standing want to hold forth.
They rain down upon faces lifted.
We must sit down on the floor
on the earth
on stones and mats and blankets.
There must be no front to the speaking
no platform, no rostrum,
no stage or table.
We will not crane
to see who is speaking.
Perhaps we should sit in the dark.
In the dark we could utter our feelings.
In the dark we could propose
and describe and suggest.
In the dark we could not see who speaks
and only the words
would say what they say.
Thus saying what we feel and what we want,
what we fear for ourselves and each other
into the dark, perhaps we could begin
to begin to listen.
Perhaps we should talk in groups
small enough for everyone to speak.
Perhaps we should start by speaking softly.
The women must learn to dare to speak.
The men must bother to listen.
The women must learn to say, I think this is so.
The men must learn to stop dancing solos on the ceiling.
After each speaks, she or he
will repeat a ritual phrase:
It is not I who speaks but the wind.
Wind blows through me.
Long after me, is the wind.

Laying down the tower
    Each of the following poems issues from a card in the Tarot deck. The Tarot cards have existed in some form since the Renaissance, and always they have carried a heretical meaning in their rich freight of the common symbols of Western culture, Western literature. I first ran across them many, many years ago when I was passionately involved in Yeats, his poetry, his ideas, the people whose work touched his own, including the creators of the deck I use still, Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite.
    In the late sixties I began to handle the cards again. Whether using them in a mixture of divination and covert advice-giving to friends or meditating on individual cards, I found they stirred my imagination and often provided imagery that would enter my work. For me they are rich and disturbing and provoke many levels of responding, feeling and knowing.
    These eleven poems are the cards of a Tarot reading. As in any reading, the context of the total set influences the way individual cards are interpreted. Every reading of the cards implies judgments—a valuing of some attributes and activities and a condemning of others. Every reading has underlying it a clumping of ideas about self and others, about good and bad, about female and male, about what winning and losing mean.
    This reading is political; the values are different from the more conventional ways of reading the deck. But they’re not any more present than in the ways that say the Nine of Cups is a fortunate card because it means you get a lot of “goods” to have and hold.
    We must break through the old roles to encounter our own meanings in the symbols we experience in dreams, in songs, in vision, in meditation. Some of these symbols are much older than capitalism, and some contain knowledge we must recover; but we receive all through a filter that has aligned the stuff of our dreams, our visions, our poetry by values not our own.
    What we use we must remake. Then only we are not playing with dead dreams but seeing ourselves more clearly, and more clearly becoming. The defeated in history lose their names, theirgoddesses, their language, their culture. The myths we imagine we are living (old westerns, true romances) shape our choices.
    Some of the most significant myths are those of history. Here I am reconciling myself to my own history and trying to bring my