Last month’s pre-Christmas storm is one we’ll be remembering for years. The damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure is heartbreaking and terrifying. Wildlife, too, took a beating, with many sea turtles blown in, stunned by the cold. Storms aren’t all bad; they’re part of our life on this fragile spit of sand, and necessary to the ongoing processes of shore, flora, and fauna, which have lived with them for thousands of years. But when the winds are as wrong-directioned as those southeast winds were, the tenuous lives we’ve built at the sea’s edge are suddenly thrown into relief. We didn’t build for this. It will be hard to recover, harder still to plan for a future in which the weather becomes more and more strange.
I hope it isn’t too soon to look at a poet’s celebration of a “good” storm: a fall nor’easter, which is justifiably scary if you’re out in a boat or worried about a boat on a mooring, but a bit thrilling if you’re safe watching the seas sculpt anew the back shore, as they do every winter, scouring them clear of summer’s footprints and bonfire pits. Nor’easters are less a weather event than a visitation by a wild and tempestuous community member, someone dramatic and harsh who nonetheless is known as part of the fabric of our lives. Marge Piercy uses a storm’s thrashing drama to open the door to reflection.
With her first poetry collection published in 1968, and her most recent in 2020, Piercy has been a vital voice to generations of writers for more than half a century. Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, which she edited in 1988, was the first anthology I ever bought as a student in Oregon. It was beyond thrilling to see women’s writing celebrated after an education in which women were peripheral. She was such a legend to me that I was amazed to discover when I moved to the East that she was living just down the road in Wellfleet, where she continues to write and teach.
Piercy’s “October nor’easter” is a poem I love for its clarity — there’s not a stray syllable in that first stanza — and for the surprising turn at the poem’s hinge: “But I have had them—/ torrents of days.” Here, the metaphor rises and takes over the poem, which becomes a reflection on a long life well lived. This could be such a boring and familiar metaphor, but Piercy pushes it toward freshness. Torrents of days!
In part, the poem’s delight is in those green leaves ripped by a too-early storm, the violence done to trees unprepared for big storms, more vulnerable to breakage because of those leaves still acting as sails upon them. In the last half of the poem, Piercy herself becomes not the tree but the storm. She’s the one who’s been rough with her life, violently hungry for it, not battered but polished by wildness.
The poem picks up speed at the end, the images and connections jumbling and tangling — and that’s reflected in the way Piercy leaves us hanging at “grabbed” (the only stanza not end-stopped), opening space and tension, rushing us across that gap.
And that ending! The body shining because of storms and hungers. No gentle touch for Piercy. No, she celebrates the way love can rub “sweetly,/ hard.” Next time you’re out in a high wind, blown sand scouring your face, or next time your passions seem like they may be tipping dangerously toward excess, think of your own bones being “shine[d] like opals” from such exposure. Know that you’re vibrantly alive.
October nor’easter
By Marge Piercy
Leaves rip from the trees
still green as rain scuds
off the ocean in broad grey
scimitars of water hard
as granite pebbles flung
in my face.
Sometimes my days are torn
from the calendar,
hardly touched and gone,
like leaves too fresh
still to fall littering
sodden on the bricks.
But I have had them—
torrents of days. Who
am I to complain they
shorten? I used them
hard, wore them out
and down, grabbed
at what chance offered.
If I stand stripped
and bare, my bones
still shine like opals
where love rubbed sweetly,
hard, against them.
Reprinted with permission from The Crooked Inheritance. © Knopf, 2006.
