Stately vistas of stately vistas

Rooms opening into each other
beckon, light filling each arch—
not a railroad flat although I
surely have lived in such
in Chicago, Brooklyn.

�

Power, wealth require big
�rooms and vistas—Hampton Court
�for instance that Henry stole
�from Cardinal Wolsey. I’m
�reminded of old condensed

�

milk cans with cow inside cow
�inside cow, as I stand staring
�but Versailles salons are all
�for giants or those who think
�they are. I can walk through

�

entering the rows of door
�ways each contained in the next
�to my eye. Whoever needed
�to spread out so, amid chairs
�no one could loaf in, tables

�

fit only for night long feasts
�mirrored rooms reflecting
�mirrored rooms? I escape
�into the sunlight under
�standing the guillotine.

�

Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005) and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006).

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