The Arava Review

Down, down, seven miles down in the thick
darkness that weighs so much we can’t
breathe imagining it, but we cannot imagine.
How silent it must be and yet creatures
grow, eat and are eaten, in silence,
in the utter blackness of the ultimate deep.

It is a place only certain scientists armored
in vehicles much stronger than tanks,
than spaceships, can go and come back.
I sit in the cooling sand staring. Waves
hiss at me like great snarling cats.
They toss bladderwrack at my toes.

Somewhere under those humpbacked
waves are mountains higher than Everest.
Water is the real element of this world
and billions of creatures thrive there
while we scuttle over the dry places
calling ourselves planet masters.

We came from that cold cauldron
crawling laboriously up and out
into the unfriendly air. Sleep too
is an ocean where nightly I sink
past armored and tentacled shapes
and fear always I may drown.

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 books of poetry including: Details »

When they found Emeline, a nail
held her sack dress together

at the neck. She fished and gathered herbs
to sell for curing leather from the land

her people held since they took it from the Cherokee,
quilted mountainsides in Appalachia

where they hewed walnut into rocking chairs,
and sang the stony country’s blessings be,

and ballads carried in their ears from Scotland.
From my grandmother, her granddaughter,

I have one word in her dialect: stime.
Long-ah, half-rhyme with steam, its meaning: not enough.

As, there’s nary stime of tea, nor sugar nar.
They took apart her house to save the boards.

Off a dirt road, in iron light, in the mountain graveyard
her clan’s settler stones grow up with moss

thick as the harmonies in shape-note tune.
Among mushrooms, ivy, rhododendron

are tracings, the shadowy foundations
of the cabin where she persevered and died.

Tess Taylor.

.

Domestic Economy -for MASHalf

apologetic, she settles.
She sighs I’m just a flop.

But in her improbable rubble—
old phone bills pills photographs defunct pens—

she sees distant islands:
Old preacher, mountain town,

philosopher, Maine.
On her small stove the kettle is whistling.

She wants to tell me again.
I urge her about clutter: throw it away.

Still in crazed photos and cracked rubberbands
she ravels the leapfrogging record:

Skeins of births, accidents, gravestones.
Continents crossed, the long travel:

each faraway home.
Each object holds time, earmarks tale.

Even old typefaces make her sentimental.
In her clutter democracy, wild equality blooms.

Unhinged, open in chaos. Alive quiveringly.
Around her, eras dislodge, sliding free.

Beyond, slick magazine pages admonish
straighten, straighten. Be clean.

Tess Taylor.

TESS TAYLOR has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Review, the Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, Memorious, and The New Yorker. She is currently the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, and works one day a week on an organic farm.

What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.

Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
Into pets, not our food.

The old woman looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Nor caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?

We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure.
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.

Marge Piercy

How new can a year be?
We carry into the first night
loads of broken promises
protruding sharp as icepicks,
the weight of all we should
not have done bending
our spines almost double.

Our minds are wrapped
around what we failed to
do, bandages on emptiness.
Such a pile of dirty paper
such trash we inflict on
the world we swore to
repair, still unredeemed.

Can we forgive ourselves?
let alone those who injured
slandered, plotted against
us? So we wobble into
this testing season moving
like old wooden sailboats
on wind that is our breath.

So we put ourselves
into drydock to be scraped
clean of barnacles, worms
that eat through planks.
Thus we haul ourselves
up to greet the new moon
praying to be renewed.

Marge Piercy