Free Circles on the Water by Marge Piercy Page A

sense of that history to you. I experience current media and official formulas about the recent past as an assault, a robbery. At the same time, in my third movement I go through a sense of ghostly recurrence, of centrifugal forces and schisms that unnecessarily rack and divide. Each succeeding movement has been for me a qualitative change in depth of personal involvement, in perception of the world, in what I want; the totality of the struggle in the women’s movement has shaken me and altered me past the level of conscious mind. But trying to write our own history is of common concern, for if we cannot learn from that recent past and each other, we become our worst rhetoric. Whatever is not an energy source is an energy sink.
    1973

THE SIGNIFICATOR,
THE QUERENT:
The queen of pentacles
    This is my deck I unwrap, and this is the card for me.
    I will in any house find quickly like my sister the cat
    the most comfortable chair, snug out of drafts.
    Empathy flows through my fingers: I need to touch.
    I am at home in that landscape of unkempt garden,
    mulch and manure, thorny blackberry and sunflower and grape coiling,
    tomato plants mad with fecundity bending their stakes,
    asparagus waving fronds in the wind.
    Even in a New York apartment with dirt
    bought in bags like chocolate candy, I raised herbs.
    I prefer species roses rough as weeds
    with a strong scent, simple flowers and hips good for jam.
    I like wine’s fine weather on my palate.
    I can sink into my body like a mole
    and be lost in the tunnels of the nerves, suckling.
    I want to push roots deep in my hillside and sag with ripeness,
    an apple tree sprawling with fruit.
    The music sacred to me speaks through drums
    directly on my pulses, into the chambers of my brain.
    Yet this knowing is hard and bloody, that should dance through us.
    Too many have been murdered from the sky,
    the soil has been tainted and blows away and the water stinks.
    I want to grow into the benign mother with open hands
    healing and fertile but must spay myself to serve,
    sear off one breast like an Amazon to fight
    for even the apple that shines in the hand
    is secretly waxed and full of poison.
    The orange is dyed with the blood of the picker.
    The peach plucked green tastes of paper dollars,
    run off by the emperor to finance his wars.
    How often my own words set my teeth on edge
    sour and hard, tearing the roof of my mouth.
    What I do well and what I must do make war in my chest.
    Through other women sometimes I can touch
    pruned selves, smothered wishes, small wet cries that vanished
    and think how all together we make up one good strong woman.
    Still to get strength
    for the things we have to do that frighten me
    I go and dig my hands into the ground.

THE MATTER:
The tower struck by lightning reversed; the overturning of the tower
    All my life I have been a prisoner under the Tower.
    Some say that grey lid is the sky. Our streets are hammers.
    Grey is the water we drink, grey the face I cannot love in the mirror,
    grey is the money we lack, the itch and scratch of skins rubbing.
    Grey is the color of work without purpose or end,
    and the cancer of hopelessness creeping through the gut.
    In my bones are calcium rings of the body’s hunger
    from grey bread that turns to ash in the belly.
    In my brain schooled lies rot into self-hatred: and who
    can I hate in the cattle car subway
    like the neighbor whose elbow cracks my ribs?
    The Tower of Baffle speaks bureaucratic and psychologese,
    multiple choice, one in vain, one insane, one trite as rain.
    Military bumblewords, pre-emptive stroke, mind and body count and strategic omelet.
    Above in the sun live those who own, making our weather with their refuse.
    Their neon signs instruct us through the permanent smog.
    Rockefellers, Mellons and Du Ponts, you Fords and Houghtons,
    who are you to own my eyes? Who gave me to be your serf?
    I have never seen your faces but your walls surround me.
    With the loot of the world you built these stinking