Love like a ticking bomb

The text was a discussion of his business problems. The subtext was you. Always just on the edge of my vision like a mote formed of opal and shadow you were there, moving just out of range. I was a pot on high simmer, dangerously close to boiling and then bubbling over with a stench of beef stew burning. No lid could contain my scalding heat. I was pregnant with the thought of you, my body curling and coiling around you and daily you grew in me bigger and bigger till my organs were crushed by that heavy desire. I went visiting, I ate meals, I sat in front of television and movie screens eyes glazed over like ponds just freezing opaque. You were the hidden meaning of whatever I said. Driving down the highway to Boston, two figures in the front seat eyes forward and between them, you sat, invisible: the real drama was what you asked and I gave. You were my daily addiction like cocaine, a bottle of sherry in a drawer, the marathon runner’s high: you were the sweet secret vice my life was organized around as a walled maze. Inside that cocoon of wan dry passivity, irrevocable change split that old life open and out crawled a new avid creature fully sexual on painted wings ready to fly and mate at last. Sometimes we get just what we want, and it alters us ever after, neither better nor worse but clearer, with different blood and face.

From “Available Light” (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95, cloth; $8.95, paper; 129 pp.). This is Piercy’s 11th collection of poetry. The poem above comes from its third section, “Country Pleasures,” which is mostly love poetry. Other sections include poems for the dead and about death; poems about Piercy’s Jewish religion; poems Piercy wrote while writing her novel, “Gone to Soldiers,” which was set in World War II France and Britain; and autobiographical poems.