Marge Piercy
What marks does a marriage leave
when one of them has gone
into another entanglement?
A bottle of wine chosen, forgotten.
A old cat dying slowly of kidney
failure. Some books no longer
valued, music of another decade
they used to dance to, back
when dancing was together.
A green wool sweater abandoned
in the corner of a closet. Railroad
tie steps they buried in the hillside.
Trees they planted now taller
than the house. A mask, a wooden
necklace from foreign travels.
Pain eroding like a dying pond
from the edges but still deep
enough in the center to drown.
MARGE PIERCY
Marge Piercy has published 18 poetry collections including Colors Passing Through Us, What Are Big Girls Made Of?, The Art of Blessing the Day, and most recently The Crooked Inheritance, all from Knopf. She has written seventeen novels, most recently Sex Wars from Morrow/Harper Collins, who published her memoir, Sleeping with Cats. Two of her earlier novels, Vida and Dance the Eagle to Sleep are being reprinted by PM Press in 2011. In March, Knopf published a second volume of Marge’s selected poems, The Hunger Moon.
