Neverending but it will
I am a maker of lists. I feel
pleasure crossing off what
I’ve managed to get done.
How seldom I reach the bottom.
Maybe I should make shorter
lists? Is it duty or compulsion?
Or maybe I no longer trust
my memory. It’s like a cat
who only comes when you
call if she feels like it. Some
days lists fill the page as if
it were a poem. But isn’t.
Some items I repeat day after
day, guilt growing like mold
on stale bread. They swell.
I will die at end of me
mourned by lists I made
and never finished doing.
On my gravestone should
be inscribed: she still had
stuff to do. And the dates.
• • •
Home again at last
When I was four, the backyard was my adventure.
At five I’d cross the alley to play with a cop’s
daughter whose mother had a perennial
headache and lay in bed, blinds closed.
By ten the alley was my mine to dig into trash
for discarded treasures. My cats came from there.
I walked to school and the drugstore for comics
and ice cream, was sent to the bakery and butcher.
By twelve I had a girlfriend on our neighborhood’s
edge, in vacant lots by the railroad tracks,
another by the gasworks. I joined a proto-gang
Our turf covered thirty-two blocks.
By fifteen we moved out of the ghetto.
I escaped the house via three busses
to the Main Public Library on Woodward,
the Art Museum with the Rivera mural.
I knew every inch, where friends could talk
unobserved on a medieval stone staircase.
At sixteen I was working in Sam’s Cutrate
Department Store in better dresses $3.98
and up. At seventeen I escaped to college,
Ann Arbor. I hitched rides to Chicago, New
York. When I won a major Hopwood award,
I flew a charter to Europe. The wide world
opened. For decades I boarded planes
every two weeks. Greece, Cuba, Norway,
Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic,
Mexico, Scotland, Denmark, 47 states.
I was an accomplished road warrior
packing like a magician in a carry-on
running through airports, quick off
each plane, my own food in briefcase.
Now I live in a village I love, on land whose
trees I planted and whose soil I made from
garbage and seaweed, a house I built,
a love that’s my grounded adventure.
• • •
Rejoice?
Someone you hate dies.
A jagged tooth gone.
The tongue searches.
• • •
Marge Piercy