A Gift of Light

24 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW MARGE PIERCY A GIFT OF LIGHT Grape conserve from the red Caco vine Robert and I planted five years ago: it is rooted deep in the good dark loam of the bottom land, where centuries have washed the topsoil from the sandy hill of pine and oak, whose bark shows the scabs of fire. Once this was an orchard on a farm. When lilacs bloom in May I can find the cellar hole of the old house. Once this was a village of Pamet Indians. From shell middens I can find their campgrounds. Sun touches my face at the typewriter. From the locust outside my window the fierce hasty October winds have stripped the delicate grassgreen fingernails. Tonight we will put up our last tomato pickles. Winter is coming early this year. The birds that go are gone, the plants are retreating underground, their hopes in tubers, bulbs, seed. The peaches, the tomatoes, the pears, the berries glow like muted lanterns on their shelves. Everything is put down for the winter except the root crops still tunneling in the ground under the salt hay mulch we gathered at the mouth of the Herring River as the sun kippered our salty brown backs. Even the fog that day was hot as soup. At evening when we made love our skin tasted like tears and leather. This year the autumn colors are muted. Too much rain, the winds tore the leaves loose before they were ready. This year I came close to death but I am not ready to die. Tonight PIERCY 25 I will be with Robert, tomorrow with you. I weave back and forth, I braid my life in its strong and muted colors and I taste my love in me this morning like something harsh and sweet, like raw sugar cane I chewed in Cuba fresh cut, oozing its sap. On those Washington avenues that look like emperor-sized cemeteries, vast Roman mausoleum after mausoleum where Justice and Health are budgeted out of the existence of the many for the pleasure of the few, men who smell of good cologne are pushing pins across maps. It is time to attack the left again, it is time for a mopping up operation against those of us who opposed the war too soon, too seriously, too long. It is time to silence the shrill voices of women demanding things that incommode men with harems of illpaid secretaries, men for whom industries purr, men who buy death wholesale. Today some are released from prison and others are sucked in. Those who would not talk to grand juries are boxed from the light to grow fungus on their brains and those who talked receive a message it is time to talk again. I try hard to be simple. Not in my loving, not in my friendships, because I am never happy unless I am stretched, rich with confusion and choice and family. But simple in loyalty, simple in value. I try hard to remember always to ask for whom what is done is done. Who gets and who loses? Who pays and who rakes off the profit? Whose life is shortened? Whose heat is shut off? Whose children end shooting up or shot in the streets? I try to remember to ask simple questions, I try to remember to love my friends and hate my enemies. But their faces are hidden in the vaults of banks, their names are inscribed on the great plains by strip mining and you can 26 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW only read the script from Mars. Their secret wills are encoded in the computers that operate nuclear submarines armed with the godheads of death. They enter me in the drugs I buy, in the chemicals that erode my genes. They enter my blood. They are invisible as the Sevin in the water that flows from the tap, as Strontium 90 in milk. You are part comrade and part enemy: you are part guerrilla and part prison guard. I hold you in my arms, you fight beside Blacks in Boston, but the Pentagon has programmed your fantasies, the Bank of America has a lien on your...