The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 Read online

  My poems go out into the world as best they can in print or on the Internet and get used for memorial services, love notes, political organizing, teaching, religious services, weddings, and bar and bat mitzvot. All that is appropriate. I write the poems, but they belong to whoever wants them. That’s how poetry stays alive—in the minds and voices of those who want to share it. I hear regularly from people for whom my poetry is meaningful and part of their consciousness. That means a great deal to me.

  from

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  A key to common lethal fungi

  What rots it is taking

  for granted. To assume what

  is given you is laid on like the water

  that rushes from the faucet singing

  when you turn the tap. Wait

  till the reservoir goes dry

  to learn how precious are those

  clear diamond drops.

  We hunt our lovers like deer

  through the thorny thickets and after

  we have caught love we start

  eating it to the bone.

  We use it up in hamburgers

  complaining of monotony.

  We walk all over the common miracles

  without bothering to wipe our feet.

  Then we wonder why we need more

  and more salt to taste our food.

  My old man, my old lady, my

  ball and chain: listen, even the cat

  you found starving in the alley

  who purrs you to sleep dancing

  with kneading paws in your hair

  will vanish if your heart closes its fist.

  Habit’s fine dust chokes us.

  As in a city the streetlights

  and neon signs prevent us from viewing

  the stars, so the casual noise, the smoke

  of ego turning over its engine blinds

  us till we can no longer see past

  our minor needs to the major constellations

  of the ram, the hunter, the swan

  that guide our finite gaze

  through the infinite dark.

  The common living dirt

  The small ears prick on the bushes,

  furry buds, shoots tender and pale.

  The swamp maples blow scarlet.

  Color teases the corner of the eye,

  delicate gold, chartreuse, crimson,

  mauve speckled, just dashed on.

  The soil stretches naked. All winter

  hidden under the down comforter of snow,

  delicious now, rich in the hand

  as chocolate cake: the fragrant busy

  soil the worm passes through her gut

  and the beetle swims in like a lake.

  As I kneel to place the seeds

  careful as stitching, I am in love.

  You are the bed we all sleep on.

  You are the food we eat, the food

  we ate, the food we will become.

  We are walking trees rooted in you.

  You can live thousands of years

  undressing in the spring your black

  body, your red body, your brown body

  penetrated by the rain. Here

  is the goddess unveiled,

  the earth opening her strong thighs.

  Yet you grow exhausted with bearing

  too much, too soon, too often, just

  as a woman wears through like an old rug.

  We have contempt for what we spring

  from. Dirt, we say, you’re dirt

  if we were not all your children.

  We have lost the simplest gratitude.

  We lack the knowledge we showed ten

  thousand years past, that you live

  a goddess but mortal, that what we take

  must be returned; that the poison we drop

  in you will stunt our children’s growth.

  Tending a plot of your flesh binds

  me as nothing ever could, to the seasons,

  to the will of the plants, clamorous

  in their green tenderness. What

  calls louder than the cry of a field

  of corn ready, or trees of ripe peaches?

  I worship on my knees, laying

  seeds in you, that worship rooted

  in need, in hunger, in kinship,

  flesh of the planet with my own flesh,

  a ritual of compost, a litany of manure.

  My garden’s a chapel, but a meadow

  gone wild in grass and flower

  is a cathedral. How you seethe

  with little quick ones, vole, field

  mouse, shrew and mole in their thousands,

  rabbit and woodchuck. In you rest

  the jewels of the genes wrapped in seed.

  Power warps because it involves joy

  in domination; also because it means

  forgetting how we too starve, break

  like a corn stalk in the wind, how we

  die like the spinach of drought,

  how what slays the vole slays us.

  Because you can die of overwork, because

  you can die of the fire that melts

  rock, because you can die of the poison

  that kills the beetle and the slug,

  we must come again to worship you

  on our knees, the common living dirt.

  Toad dreams

  That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it.

  —Henry Thoreau

  The dream of toads: we rarely

  credit what we consider lesser

  life with emotions big as ours,

  but we are easily distracted,

  abstracted. People sit nibbling,

  before television’s flicker watching

  ghosts chase balls and each other

  while the skunk is out risking grisly

  death to cross the highway to mate;

  while the fox scales the wire fence

  where it knows the shotgun lurks

  to taste the sweet blood of a hen.

  Birds are greedy little bombs

  bursting to give voice to appetite.

  I had a cat who died of love, starving

  when my husband left her too.

  Dogs trail their masters across con-

  tinents. We are far too busy

  to be starkly simple in passion.

  We will never dream the intense

  wet spring lust of the toads.

  Down at the bottom of things

  In the marshes of the blood river

  frogs blurt out their grocery lists

  of lust, and some frogs croak poems.

  In the brackish backwaters of the psyche

  the strong night side of our nature

  develops its food chain. I do believe

  that in corporate board rooms, in bank

  offices, in the subcommittees of Congress,

  senators with oil bribes easing their way

  toward power act from greed, yes,

  but petty hatreds flash swarming thick

  as piranhas in their murky speeches, and around

  their deals musty resentments circle

  buzzing like fat horseflies.

  In the salty estuary of the blood river

  small intermittent truths dart

  in fear through the eel grass, and the nastier

  facts come striding, herons stabbing

  with long bills yet graceful when they rise in heavy

  flight. Here we deal with the archaic base

  of advertising slogans and bureaucratic

  orders that condemn babies to kwashiorkor,

  here on the mud flats of language. Our duty

  rises red as the rusty moon, waxing

  and waning surely but always returning.

  Here where the salty fluids of the blood

  meet the renewal of fr
eshwater streaming

  from the clouds soaked through the grasses,

  down runoff ditches, wandering through brown

  meanders of stream; here where the ocean

  turns on its elbow muttering and begins

  to heave back on itself, whispering

  its rise in all the little fiddler crab

  burrows, through all the interstices

  of tidal grass, we read the news

  in minute flotsam of the large

  catastrophes out at sea and upriver.

  The oil slicks, the wrecks, the sewage

  tainted, the chemicals dumped in the stream

  we taste here clamlike as we strain

  the waters to prophesy in frogs’ tongues.

  A marsh smells like sex and teems

  with tiny life that all the showier

  big creatures of the shallow sea

  fatten on. Here the only decision

  that presents itself is to see, to watch,

  to taste, to listen, to know and to say,

  all with care as the heron stalks probing,

  all with care as the crab scuttles into the safety

  of burrow, all with care as the kingfisher

  watches, one way the fish, the other way

  the hawk. To survive saying, to say again

  and again, here in the rich soup of creation,

  in the obscure salty pit where the rhythms

  of life repeat and renew, and the cost

  of greed is etched in poison on every cell.

  A story wet as tears

  Remember the princess who kissed the frog

  so he became a prince? At first they danced

  all weekend, toasted each other in the morning

  with coffee, with champagne at night

  and always with kisses. Perhaps it was

  in bed after the first year had ground

  around she noticed he had become cold

  with her. She had to sleep

  with heating pad and down comforter.

  His manner grew increasingly chilly

  and damp when she entered a room.

  He spent his time in water sports,

  hydroponics, working on his insect

  collection.

  Then in the third year

  when she said to him one day, “My dearest,

  are you taking your vitamins daily,

  you look quite green,” he leaped

  away from her.

  Finally on their

  fifth anniversary she confronted him.

  “My precious, don’t you love me any

  more?” He replied, “Ribbit. Ribbit.”

  Though courtship turns frogs into princes,

  marriage turns them quietly back.

  Absolute zero in the brain

  Penfield the great doctor did a lobotomy

  on his own sister and recorded

  pages of clinical observations

  on her lack of initiative afterward.

  Dullness, he wrote, is superseded

  by euphoria at times. Slight hemi-

  paresis with aphasia. The rebellious sister

  died from the head down into the pages

  of medical journals and Penfield founded

  a new specialty. Intellectuals

  sneer at moviegoers who confuse

  Dr. Frankenstein with his monster.

  The fans think Frankenstein is the monster.

  Isn’t he?

  Eating my tail

  There are times in my life to which I

  return like a cat scratching, licking,

  worrying at an old sore, a long since

  exterminated nest of fleas behind my ear.

  I seem sure that if I keep poking

  and rubbing that old itch will finally

  be quelled. Or is it pattern I seek?

  A mapmaker returning to the mountains

  to pace out again the distances.

  Of course, if the massacre had not

  occurred in this pass, why would we care?

  Some disasters alter the landscape

  and realign even the roads driven

  over years before. It is the bloody

  moon of pain that gives a lurid

  backlighting to this scene I peer at

  beating my wings of anxiety silent

  as a bat. Yet if pain gives portent

  to the words spoken, it denies entrance.

  They sit at the table and eat. Wine

  is poured, she gets up to bring

  warm bread. Yellow apples are heaped

  in an orange bowl whose sides reflect

  candle flames. Telling a story, she takes

  his hand. I know of course what she thinks

  is happening and how wrong she is.

  But if I opened his forehead, would I find

  the violence and anger to come? The past,

  it’s turning out the pocket of a jacket

  I wore in the garden: plant ties, half

  a packet of seeds, a mummified peach:

  a combination of intention and waste.

  They laugh heartily and the soup steams

  and the golden apples shine like lumps of amber.

  The present tears at the past as if living

  were something the mind could ever hold

  like water in a cup or a map in the hand.

  Maps are abstractions useful for finding

  whatever is actually entered on them.

  Otherwise you just walk in. And through.

  When you go back it’s always someplace else.

  It breaks

  You hand me a cup of water;

  I drink it and thank you pretending

  what I take into me so calmly

  could not kill me. We take food

  from strangers, from restaurants

  behind whose swinging doors flies

  swarm and settle, from estranged

  lovers who dream over the salad plates

  of breaking the bones of our backs.

  Trust flits through the apple

  blossoms, a tiny spring warbler

  in bright mating plumage. Trust

  relies on learned pattern

  and signal to let us walk down

  stairs without thinking each

  step, without stumbling.

  I take parts of your body

  inside me. I give you

  the flimsy black lace and sweat

  stained sleaze of my secrets.

  I lay my sleeping body naked

  at your side. Jump, you shout.

  I do and you catch me.

  In love we open wide as a house

  to a summer afternoon, every shade up

  and window cranked open and doors

  flung back to the probing breeze.

  If we love long, we stand like row

  houses with no outer walls.

  Suddenly we are naked.

  The plaster of bedrooms

  hangs exposed, wallpaper

  pink and beige skins of broken

  intimacy, torn and flapping.

  To fear you is fearing my left hand

  cut off. The lineaments of old

  desire remain, but the gestures

  are new and harsh. Words unheard

  before are spat out grating

  with the rush of loosed anger.

  Friends bear banner headlines

  of your rewriting of our common

  past. I wonder at my own trust

  how absolute it was, part of me

  like the bones of my pelvis.

  You were the true center of my

  cycles, the magnetic north

  I used to plot my wanderings.

  It is not that I will not love

  again or give myself into partnership

  or lie naked sweating secrets

  like nectar, but I will never

  share a joint checking account

  and wh
en some lover tells me, Always,

  baby, I’ll be thinking, sure,

  until this one too meets an heiress

  and ships out. After a bone breaks

  you can see in X-rays

  the healing and the damage.

  What’s that smell in the kitchen?

  All over America women are burning dinners.

  It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock

  in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago;

  tofu delight in Big Sur; red

  rice and beans in Dallas.

  All over America women are burning

  food they’re supposed to bring with calico

  smiles on platters glittering like wax.

  Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined

  but spewing out missiles of hot fat.

  Carbonized despair presses like a clinker

  from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.

  If she wants to grill anything, it’s

  her husband spitted over a slow fire.

  If she wants to serve him anything

  it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly

  ticking like the heart of an insomniac.

  Her life is cooked and digested,

  nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.

  Look, she says, once I was roast duck

  on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.

  Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

  The weight

  1.

  I lived in the winter drought of his anger,

  cold and dry and bright. I could not breathe.