To Find a Steady Center: Marge Piercy
To have without holding
By Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
A few years ago I tried to memorize several poems. I was mildly unsuccessful perhaps because my iPhone and internet addled brain can no long do that work well, perhaps because I am no longer a school aged child. Since then I have discovered the poems that want to lodge themselves in your heart do just that. It takes no effort of memorization or rehearsal. That is how the first lines of Piecy’s poem are for me. “Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges.” I want to not be the worried mom, the mom with nerves and I think I wear it deceivingly well to those who are not in my most intimate circle. But I am. I am a nervous mom, worrying about this outcome and that, weighing this risk and that. It was Piercy’s lines that gave me the mantra to think about motherhood differently. To love with my arms open, allowing the doors to flap on the hinges as I teach my children to live in the world.
And now, once again I am worried what will become of the people I love, not just my children or parents, but my low income neighbors with childcare bearing on them and less hours to work as the economy comes to a halt. I worry about my neighbors with medically fragile people in their care that need Chlorox wipes for the maintenance of their daily life, now without the resources they need. And this poem comes to me again reminding me that what we have we ought to hold lightly. There is enough if we learn to love with our hands wide open. Love is a force that can make us selfish with the care of ourselves and our family but love is also a resource that can help us look beyond ourselves and care for others as well as ourselves.
Be kind,
Cara
To Find a Quiet Center is a daily poem and meditation to offer a short, good word to those who are anxious, fearful or lonely anh who might need a gentle word of hope, encouragement or perspective during social distancing.
