Authors: Marge Piercy
Made in Detroit (10 page)
Whatever I love you try
to love. What threatens me
you stand on guard. We
talk and we talk but it
never wears out. Together
we lay out a feast of love.
We are told on certain days and nights
the dead are close to us. Yet I find
Shalimar perfume, cinnamon, roasting
chicken can summon them, so that
my grandmother stands just behind me,
my mother sits at my vanity staring
into her vanished face.
If like Orpheus I try to turn to them,
seize their presence, shuffle unanswered
questions before them, cards on a table
faceup, they wisp away like the scent
that brought them. If I think of them,
remembering a dress, a laugh rising
like smoke to the ceiling
they stay away. They come when
they choose and leave so quickly
I wonder if it happened. Sometimes
I hear my mother’s voice behind
me, commenting on my cooking,
my clothing. Grandma has come
like Eliyahu on Pesach,
stood for a moment over the laden
table and left again. Two of my cats
came back to visit, ever so briefly.
What do they want, these dead
ones that never linger? They tease,
perhaps, or have only as much energy
as a candle that burns itself out.
You may love the ocean. Never boring,
always in motion, sliding up the shingle
then sucked back in, waves with manes
of white lions’ lashing at the shore, waves
standing like a bear tearing at the dunes.
You may love the ocean, but it does
not love you back. It would as soon eat
you as keep you afloat. Perhaps it
loves the great whales, perhaps it
likes walruses, but it’s always hungry.
You may love the ocean like my friend
who at eighty will go far out twice
a day if he can get a tourist to pay
his gas. He likes to be out of sight
of land. The sea lurks under his boat
waiting. The ocean is always beautiful
here in all weathers it churns up. It
does not approve of land and wants to
take it back. Someday it will. Even
the hill I live on: sandy bottom.
Tides will stir the ashes of my mother
and the tiny bones of my cats. My grave
will be home to crabs. Who is to say
that is not just that the sea take into
itself what long ago it gave us.
“Made in Detroit,” Napalm Health Spa, 2012.
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Marge Piercy is the author of eighteen previous poetry collections, seventeen novels and a book of short stories, four nonfiction books, two memoirs and one play. Her work has been translated into nineteen languages, and she has won many honors, including the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist, memoirist, community radio interviewer, and essayist. She has given more than five hundred readings and lectures in the United States and abroad.