Moon Is Always Female Read online

  ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY

  Poetry

  Colors Passing Through Us

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Early Grrrl

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Mars and Her Children

  Available Light

  My Mother’s Body

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  Circles on the Water

  The Moon Is Always Female

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

  Living in the Open

  To Be of Use

  4-Telling (with Robert Hershon,

  Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)

  Hard Loving

  Breaking Camp

  Novels

  Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  The Longings of Women

  He, She and It

  Summer People

  Gone to Soldiers

  Fly Away Home

  Braided Lives

  Vida

  The High Cost of Living

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  Small Changes

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Going Down Fast

  Other

  Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir

  So You Want to Write: How to

  Master the Craft of Writing

  Fiction and the Personal

  Narrative (with Ira Wood)

  The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)

  Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt:

  Essays

  Early Ripening: American Women’s

  Poetry Now: An Anthology

  The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of

  Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Brush and ink drawing of cat from “Studies of Flowers and Animals” by Shen Chou, 1494, Ming Dynasty. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, the Republic of China.

  Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Marge Piercy

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and, simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals, where most of these poems previously appeared:

  The Ark, Aspect, Blue Buildings, Cedar Rock, Chrysalis, Croton Review, Gallimaufry, The Guardian, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Hard Pressed, Hudson River Anthology, Lady Unique, The Little Magazine, The Lunar Calendar, Mississippi Mud, Moon Dance, Mosaic, Mother Jones, National Forum, Open Places, Paintbrush, Painted Bridge Quarterly, Poetry Now, Poets On, Pulp, Pushcart Press, Real Paper, Shankpainter, Sister Courage, Sojourner, The Spirit That Moves Us, Tendril, The Thirteenth Moon, Transatlantic Review, waves, Woman Poet.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Piercy, Marge. The moon is always female. I. Title.

  PS3566.I4M6 811′.5′4 79-21866

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76134-7

  v3.1

  For Woody

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  HAND GAMES

  The inside chance

  When a friend dies

  Night flight

  Arriving

  Excursions, incursions

  Dirty poem

  Leonard Avenue

  Limited but fertile possibilities are offered by this

  brochure

  Intruding

  The damn cast

  The wrong anger

  The cast off

  Waiting outside

  Will we work together?

  In memoriam Walter and Lillian Lowenfels

  Under red Aries

  The ordinary gauntlet

  The long death

  A battle of wills disguised

  Intimacy

  To have without holding

  My mother’s novel

  The low road

  What it costs

  Season of hard wind

  Hand games

  The doughty oaks

  Armed combat in a café

  Poetry festival lover

  Complaint of the exhausted author

  For strong women

  Apologies

  The fisherman’s catalogue

  Rainy 4th

  Neurotic in July

  Attack of the squash people

  The inquisition

  Arofa

  Cho-Cho

  Cats like angels

  A new constellation

  Indian pipe

  September afternoon at four o’clock

  Morning athletes

  The purge

  Argiope

  From the tool and die shop

  For the young who want to

  Memo

  THE LUNAR CYCLE

  The moon is always female

  SAILLE: Right to life

  UATH: May apple

  DUIR: Shadows of the burning

  TINNE: The sabbath of mutual respect

  COLL: Tumbling and with tangled mane

  MUIN: Cutting the grapes free

  GORT: The perpetual migration

  NGETAL: The great horned owl

  RUIS: The longest night

  BETH: At the well

  LUIS: White on black

  NION: Another country

  FEARN: Crescent moon like a canoe

  O!

  HAND GAMES

  The inside chance

  Dance like a jackrabbit

  in the dunegrass, dance

  not for release, no

  the ice holds hard but

  for the promise. Yesterday

  the chickadees sang fever,

  fever, the mating song.

  You can still cross ponds

  leaving tracks in the snow

  over the sleeping fish

  but in the marsh the red

  maples look red

  again, their buds swelling.

  Just one week ago a blizzard

  roared for two days.

  Ice weeps in the road.

  Yet spring hides

  in the snow. On the south

  wall of the house

  the first sharp crown

  of crocus sticks out.

  Spring lurks inside the hard

  casing, and the bud

  begins to crack. What seems

  dead pares its hunger

  sharp and stirs groaning.

  If we have not stopped

  wanting in the long dark,

  we will grasp our desires

  soon by the nape.

  Inside the fallen brown

  apple the seed is alive.

  Freeze and thaw, freeze

  and thaw, the sap leaps

  in the maple under the bark

  and although they have

  pronounced us dead, we

  rise again invisibly,

  we rise and the sun sings

  in us sweet and smoky

  as the blood of the maple

  that will open its leaves

  like thousands of waving hands.

  When a friend dies

  When a friend dies

  the salmon run no fatter.

  The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.

  Nothing is won by endurance

  but endurance.

  A hunger sucks at the mind

  for gone color after the last bronze

  chrysanthemum is withered by frost.


  A hunger drains the day,

  a homely sore gap

  after a tooth is pulled,

  a red giant gone nova,

  an empty place in the sky

  sliding down the arch

  after Orion in night as wide

  as a sleepless staring eye.

  When pain and fatigue wrestle

  fatigue wins. The eye shuts.

  Then the pain rises again at dawn.

  At first you can stare at it.

  Then it blinds you.

  Night flight

  Vol de nuit: It’s that French

  phrase comes to me out of a dead

  era, a closet where the bones of pets

  and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams

  of a twenty-year-old are salty water

  and the residual stickiness of berry jam

  but they have the power to paralyze

  a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength.

  Memory’s a minefield.

  Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French

  former husband. Every love has its

  season, its cultural artifacts, shreds

  of popular song like a billboard

  peeling in strips to the faces behind,

  endearments and scents, patchouli,

  musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked

  herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal

  outing, vol de nuit.

  Alone in a row on the half empty late

  plane I sit by the window holding myself.

  As the engines roar and the plane quivers

  and then bursts forward I am tensed

  and tuned for the high arc of flight

  between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold

  distant fires of the clustered stars. Below

  the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,

  ordered, radial, pulsing.

  Sometimes hurtling down a highway through

  the narrow cone of headlights I feel

  moments of exaltation, but my night

  vision is poor. I pretend at control

  as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge

  I am not really managing. I am in the hands

  of strangers and of luck. By flight he meant

  flying and I mean being flown, totally

  beyond volition, willfully.

  We fall in love with strangers whose faces

  radiate a familiar power that reminds us

  of something lost before we had it.

  The braille of the studious fingers instructs

  exactly what we have succumbed to, far too late

  to close, to retract the self that has extruded

  from us naked, vulnerable and sticky,

  the foot, the tentative eyestalked head

  of the mating snail.

  To fall in love so late is dangerous. Below,

  lights are winking out. Cars crawl into driveways

  and fade into the snow. Planes make me think

  of dying suddenly, and loving of dying

  slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed

  trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing

  my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide

  as I land. Love is plunging into darkness toward

  a place that may exist.

  Arriving

  People often labor to attain

  what turns out to be entrance

  to a small closet

  or a deep pit

  or sorrow like a toothache of the brain.

  I wanted you. I fought you

  for yourself, I wrestled

  to open you, I hung on.

  I sat on my love as on the lid

  of a chest holding a hungry bear.

  You were what I wanted: you

  still are. Now my wanting

  feeds on success and grows,

  a cowbird chick in a warbler’s

  nest, bigger by the hour, bolder

  and louder, screeching and gaping

  for more, flapping bald wings.

  I am ungainly in love as a house

  dancing. I am a factory chimney

  that has learned to play Bach

  like a carillon. I belch rusty

  smoke and flames and strange music.

  I am a locomotive that wants

  to fly to the moon.

  I should wear black

  on black like a Greek village woman,

  making signs against the evil eye

  and powder my head white. Though I try

  to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire

  on a mountain, and tomorrow

  and the next day make me shudder

  equally with hope and fear.

  Excursions, incursions

  1.

  “Learning to manage the process

  of technological innovation

  more productively” is the theme

  of the speech the man beside me

  on the plane to Washington

  will be saying to a Congressional

  subcommittee. He works at M.I.T.

  He drinks a martini, glancing sideways.

  His watch flashes numbers; it houses

  a tiny computer. He observes

  me in snatches, data to analyze:

  the two-piece V-neck dress

  from New York, the manuscript

  I am cutting, the wild black

  hair, the dirt under my stubby nails.

  It doesn’t scan. I pretend

  I do not see him looking

  while I try to read his speech,

  pretending not to: a neutron

  bomb of deadly language that kills

  all warm-blooded creatures

  but leaves the system standing.

  He rates my face and body attractive

  but the presence

  disturbing. Chop, chop, I want

  to say, sure, we are enemies.

  Watch out. I try to decide

  if I can learn anything useful

  to my side if I let him

  engage me in a game of

  conversation.

  2.

  At the big round table in the university

  club, the faculty are chatting

  about wives, marriages, divorces, visiting

  arrangements. They all belong

  to the same kinship system. They have

  one partner at a time, then terminate.

  Monogamy means that the husband has

  sex only a couple of times with each

  other female, I figure out, and

  the wife, only with him. Afterwards

  the children spend summers/weekends/

  Sundays with the father.

  Listening becomes eavesdropping and they

  begin to feel my silence like a horse

  in the diningroom. Gradually as I sit

  my hair mats. Feathers stick up from

  it, crow and eagle. My cheeks break

  out into painted zigzag designs. My spear

  leans against the back of my chair.

  They begin to question me, oh, um,

  do you live communally? What do

  you mean, “open”? Hair breaks through

  the back of my hands. My fangs

  drum on the table top. In another moment

  I will swing by my long prehensile

  tail from the crystal chandelier,

  shitting in the soup.

  3.

  The men are laughing as I approach

  and then they price me: that calculating

  scan. Everything turns into hornets

  buzzing, swarming. One will

  tell me about his wife

  weeping tears of pure beersuds;

  one is even now swaggering down

  the Tombstone set of his mind, the fastest

  gun; one will let me know in the next

  half hour he thinks political writers

>   are opportunistic simpletons, and women

  have minds of goat fudge; one will

  only try unceasingly to bed me as if

  I were the week’s prize, and he wears

  a chain of fellowships and grants

  like sharpshooters’ medals. Mostly they

  will chase the students and drink, mostly

  they will gossip and put each other

  down, mostly they will complain. I

  am here for the women, a political

  task. They think they have a label

  for that. I am on vacation from sex

  and love, from the fatty broth

  of my life. I am seeking to be useful,

  the good godmother. We are acting

  in different fables. I know the plots

  of theirs, but none of them recognize

  mine, except the students, who understand

  at once they will be allowed

  to chew me to the bones.

  4.

  I am sitting on a kitchen chair.

  My feet do not reach the floor.

  If I sit forward, they’ll rest on

  a rung, but if I do that, the women

  will stop talking and look at me

  and I’ll be made to go outside

  and “play” in this taffeta dress.

  What they say is not what they

  are talking about, which lumps

  just underneath. If I listen, if I

  screw up my face and hold my breath

  and listen, I’ll see it, the moving

  bump under the rug, that snake in the

  tablecloth jungle, the bulge

  in women’s dresses you aren’t supposed

  to notice. I listen and listen

  but it doesn’t go anyplace,

  nobody comes out all

  right in the end. I get bored

  and kick the table leg and am sent

  outside to sulk, still not knowing

  why everybody said Uncle looked

  like he was asleep when he had

  lipstick on, in the funny box.

  I never got there, into the hot

  wet heart of the kitchen gossip,

  to sit twisting the ring on my finger

  worn smooth, saying my hubby, my old

  man, him. I never grew up, Mama,

  I grew off, I grew outside. I grew

  like crazy. I am the calico

  mouse gnawing at the foundations.

  The sweet snake is my friend who chews

  on the roots of the hangman’s tree

  to bring it down. I am the lump