Colors Passing Through Us

by PIERCY, MARGE

• ISBN13: 9780375710056
• ISBN10: 0375710051
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-21
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

InColors Passing Through Us, Marge Piercy is at the height of her powers, writing about what matters to her most: the lives of women, nature, Jewish ritual, love between men and women, and politics, sexual and otherwise. Feisty and funny as always, she turns a sharp eye on the world around her, bidding an ex-hausted farewell to the twentieth century and singing an "electronic breakdown blues" for the twenty-first. She memorializes movingly those who, like los desaparecidos and the victims of 9/11, disappear suddenly and without a trace. She writes an elegy for her mother, a woman who struggled with a deadening round of housework, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, and so on, "until stroke broke / her open." She remembers the scraps of lace, the touch of velvet, that were part of her maternal inheritance and first aroused her sensual curiosity. Here are paeans to the pleasures of the natural world (rosy ripe tomatoes, a mating dance of hawks) as the poet confronts her own mortality in the cycle of seasons and the eternity of the cosmos: "I am hurrying, I am running hard / toward I don't know what, / but I mean to arrive before dark." Other poems-about her grandmother's passage from Russia to the New World, or the interrupting of a Passover seder to watch a comet pass-expand on Piercy's appreciation of Jewish life that won her so much acclaim inThe Art of Blessing the Day.Colors Passing Through Usis a moving celebration of the endurance of love and of the phenomenon of life itself-a book to treasure.

Author Biography

Marge Piercy is the author of fifteen previous books of poetry. She has also written fifteen novels, including <b>Woman on the Edge of Time</b>; <b>Gone to Soldiers</b>; <b>He</b>, <b>She and It</b>; <b>City of Darkness</b>, <b>City of Light</b>; <b>and Three Women</b>, her most recent, as well as a memoir titled <b>Sleeping with Cats</b>. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into sixteen languages. Among many honors, in 1990, she won the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.

Table of Contents

WOMEN OF DARK HOUSES
Photograph of my mother sitting on the steps	3	(2)
In the attic of dreams	5	(1)
One reason I like opera	6	(2)
The good old days at home sweet home	8	(3)
Her body inscribes	11	(1)
Lost	12	(2)
The glamour of it	14	(2)
My mother gives me her recipe	16	(2)
The day my mother died	18	(2)
Too long dead	20	(2)
Long night of the incomplete	22	(2)
Jolly woman with birds	24	(2)
Still the desert	26	(2)
In the department store	28	(1)
Love has certain limited powers	29	(1)
After the darkness	30	(2)
Chrysanthemum season	32	(1)
Hunting the hunter	33	(1)
The clock in the closet	34	(5)
OTHERWISE
No one came home	39	(6)
The true patriot	45	(1)
Dirty old century: 12-31-99	46	(2)
Got the 21st century blues	48	(2)
Resort offseason	50	(2)
Minor losses	52	(1)
The disintegration	53	(2)
Finest porcelain	55	(1)
Family values	56	(3)
Gifts that keep on giving	59	(2)
Kamasutra for dummies	61	(2)
He left but can't let go	63	(1)
Not in the dark	64	(1)
How it was with us, dear grandchildren	65	(4)
WINTER PROMISES
Winter promises	69	(1)
Where beach umbrellas spread gaudy circles	70	(1)
Take it as it comes	71	(2)
The gardener's litany	73	(2)
Eclipse at the solstice	75	(1)
A kind of theft	76	(2)
The rain as wine	78	(1)
The corner	79	(2)
Taconic at midnight	81	(2)
The equinox rush	83	(2)
After the loss	85	(1)
The aria	86	(2)
Leonids over us	88	(3)
LITTLE LIGHTS
Little lights	91	(2)
Seder with comet	93	(2)
Quieting by the bay	95	(1)
Sometimes while I am chanting	96	(1)
Time of year	97	(1)
Sins of omission	98	(1)
Shadows on darkness	99	(1)
Tapuz: an orange	100	(1)
The cameo	101	(2)
Miriam's cup	103	(4)
COLORS PASSING THROUGH US
Colors passing through us	107	(3)
The grammatical difference between lay and lie	110	(1)
Love's clay	111	(1)
Old moon cradling the new moon	112	(1)
Chilled through	113	(1)
The first time I tasted you	114	(1)
Black leaves	115	(1)
The animal kingdom	116	(2)
How it goes with us	118	(1)
Black taffeta	119	(1)
Firebird	120	(1)
Worlds without end	121	(4)
RISING IN PERILOUS HOPE
Rising in perilous hope	125	(1)
Burnishing memory	126	(2)
The new era, c. 1946	128	(2)
The yellow light	130	(2)
Frozen as far as the eye can see	132	(1)
Flying over the Nebraska of my life	133	(2)
Roomers, rumors	135	(2)
Borrowed lives	137	(2)
Mexico City, 1968, summer	139	(1)
Photo instead of friend	140	(1)
Dignity	141	(2)
The garden of almost	143	(1)
On the water, reflecting herself	144	(1)
I awake feathered	145	(1)
The joys of a bad reputation	146	(2)
Old cat crying	148	(1)
The lower crust	149	(1)
Traveling dream	150	(2)
A conversation with memory	152	(2)
Tasting evanescence	154	(2)
As the way narrows	156

Excerpts

--from page 125

Rising in perilous hope
12728
What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?

What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?

If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.

If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world

twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?

I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.

I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning

come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from Colors Passing Through Us by Marge Piercy
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