Marge Piercy

Ingestion

The new leaves on the maple, the dogwood,
the birch unravel clean and bright.
I imagine myself a giraffe nibbling them.
They would taste like sorbet.

Why want to eat what pleases me?
Babies put everything in their mouths,
what is bright, what is fuzzy, what
refracts light back to their eyes.

As adults, we have learned partly
not to do that, yet we take into
our mouths and our many orifices
parts of those we find beautiful in-

wardly or outwardly, though afterward
we do give their body parts back.

Marge Piercy is the author of 17 poetry collections including Colors Passing Through Us, What Are Big Girls Made Of? and The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, and this October, The Crooked Inheritance, all from Knopf. She has written 17 novels, most recently Sex Wars from Morrow/Harper Collins, who published her memoir, Sleeping with Cats. A CD of her political poetry LOUDER, WE CAN’T HEAR YOU YET is out from Leapfrog Press, and co-authored with Ira Wood, So You Want To Write: How to Master the Craft of Fiction and Personal Narrative is now in its 2nd enlarged edition. For more information, please visit her website: www.margepiercy.com.