Moon Is Always Female Read online

under the tablecloth that moves

  stealthily toward the cream pitcher.

  After years under the rug like a tumor

  they invite me into the parlor, Mama,

  they pay me by check and it doesn’t bounce.

  I’m giving a speech tonight. Do they

  think I’m kidding? The walls I write

  on are for sale now, but the message

  is the same as I wrote in

  blood on the jail house wall.

  Energy flowing through me gets turned

  into money and they take that back,

  but the work remains, Mama, under

  the carpet, in the walls, out

  in the open. It goes on talking

  after they’ve shut me up.

  Dirty poem

  Snow lies on my fields

  though the air is so warm I want

  to roll on my back and wriggle.

  Sure, the dark downhill weep shows

  who’s winning, and the thatch of tall

  grass is sticking out of the banks,

  but I want to start digging and planting.

  My swelling hills, my leaf brown loamy

  soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,

  my garden,

  why don’t you hurry up

  and take your clothes off?

  Leonard Avenue

  Two floors down I loll

  in warm cinnamon-scented water.

  Box piled on box on box,

  up under the eaves you float

  in turgid bloodwarm sleep.

  Bundled in my robe I climb

  bearing coffee steaming incense

  on the chill stairway air.

  We’ll drink it dabbling in bed

  on the shore between waking and sleep

  where you enter my wetness and I

  take in your warmth.

  Limited but fertile possibilities

  are offered by this brochure

  We cannot have monogrammed towels

  or matches with our names on. We cannot

  have children. We cannot share joint

  tax returns. We don’t have a past.

  Our future is a striped unicorn, fragile,

  shy, the first of a new

  species born without kind

  to hostile kin. We can work together

  snarling and giggling and grunting.

  Every few years we can have a play

  as offspring. We can travel. We can

  go away and come back. We can shake

  each other rattling honest. We can have long

  twining soft voiced phonecalls that leave me

  molten and fevered. We can make each other

  laugh, cry, groan till our flesh shines

  phosphorescent, till heat shimmers in the room,

  till we steam with joy and streamers of light

  run down the insides of our eyes.

  We can love. We can love. We can

  love.

  Intruding

  What are you doing up, my cat

  complains as I come into the living

  room at two in the morning: she

  is making eyes through the glass

  at a squat ruffed grey tom. He fades

  back, only the gold eyes shining

  like headlights under the bird feeder.

  Retreat with all deliberate speed

  says the skunk in the path

  at the marsh’s edge, tail upraised

  quivering in shape like a question

  mark but in meaning an exclamation

  point.

  You are too near my nest so I will

  let you believe you can catch and

  eat me, says the whip-poor-will

  leading me through the thorniest thickets

  uphill and down ravines of briar

  as it drags its apparently broken wing.

  This is my lair, my home, my master,

  my piss-post, my good brown blanket,

  my feeding dish, my bone farm, all

  mine and my teeth are long and sharp

  as icicles and my tongue is red as your

  blood I will spill if you do not

  run, the German shepherd says loudly

  and for half a block.

  In the center of her web the spider

  crouches to charge me. In the woods

  the blue jay shrieks and the squirrels

  perch over my head chittering while all

  the small birds bide silent in the leaves.

  Wherever I march on two legs

  I am walking on somebody’s roof.

  But when I sit still and alone

  trees hatch warblers rapid as sparks.

  The price of seeing is silence.

  A voracious furnace of shrew darts

  in the grass like a truncated snake.

  On my arm a woodnymph lights probing

  me curiously, faintly, as she opens

  and closes the tapestried doors of flight.

  The damn cast

  It’s a barracuda, you say,

  that attacked, swallowed your leg

  and choked to death, still

  attached. It’s moby prick,

  the plaster caster’s bone-dry dream.

  It’s a Beef Wellington with your thigh

  as tenderloin; or a two foot

  long red-hot getting stale in the bun.

  You can no longer sneak from behind

  to tickle or seize. For ten minutes

  I hear you thumping up the staircase,

  a dinosaur in lead boots,

  before you collapse carefully in the chair

  face red as borscht and puffing steam.

  We find a freemasonry of the temporarily

  halt: people with arms in slings,

  men limping on canes, women

  swinging on crutches, cross the street

  to ask your story, tell theirs. But

  the permanently disabled whiz by

  in their wheelchairs indifferent.

  They know you only visit

  at difficulty. By spring you’ll

  be running up my stairs two

  at a time, and you won’t remember

  the mountain that loomed in each building,

  the heavy doors fortressed against you.

  All of you I can still touch,

  I cherish: how easily torn, how

  quickly smashed we are. Each street

  bristles with impaling machines.

  I say, Take Care; yet we can’t

  love in armor, can’t dance inside tanks,

  can’t wave at the world from a barnacle

  shell. The same nerves that melt

  us to butterscotch brandy sundaes

  scream pain hot as laser drills.

  Inside that long egg, you atrophy.

  The wrong anger

  Infighting, gut battles we all

  wage so well. Carnage in the fish tank.

  Alligators wrestling in bed.

  Nuclear attack

  across the breakfast table.

  Duels in the women’s center.

  The fractioning faction fight.

  Where does the bank president

  drink his martinis? Where

  do those who squeeze the juice

  from the land till it blows

  red dust in your eye

  hang out on Saturday night?

  It’s easy to kick my dog,

  my child, my lover, the woman

  across the desk. People

  burning their lives away

  for pennies pile up in neighborhoods

  like rusting car bodies.

  Why not stroll down to the corner

  yacht club and invite the chairman

  of the board of I.T. & T.

  to settle it with his fists?

  How hard to war against those

  too powerful to show us faces

  of billboard lions smiling
<
br />   from bloodflecked jaws. Their eyes

  flick over us like letters

  written too small to read,

  streets seen from seven miles

  up as they spread the peacock

  tail of executive jets

  across skies yellow with greed.

  Their ashes rain down

  on our scarred arms, the fall

  out from explosions

  they order by memo.

  The cast off

  This is a day to celebrate can-

  openers, those lantern-jawed long-tailed

  humping tools that cut through what keeps

  us from what we need: a can of beans

  trapped in its armor taunts the nails

  and teeth of a hungry woman.

  Today let us hear hurrahs for zippers,

  those small shark teeth that part

  politely to let us at what we want;

  the tape on packages that unlock

  us birthday presents; envelopes

  we slit to thaw the frozen

  words on the tundra of paper.

  Today let us praise the small

  rebirths, the emerging groundhog

  from the sodden burrow; the nut

  picked from the broken fortress of walnut

  shell, itself pried from the oily fruit

  shaken from the high turreted

  city of the tree.

  Today let us honor the safe whose door

  hangs ajar; the champagne bottle

  with its cork bounced off the ceiling

  and into the soup tureen; the Victorian lady

  in love who has removed her hood, her cloak,

  her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress,

  her underdress, her wool petticoat, her linen

  petticoats, her silk petticoats, her whalebone

  corset, her bustle, her chemise, her drawers, and

  who still wants to! Today let us praise the cast

  that finally opens, slit neatly in two

  like a dinosaur egg, and out at last

  comes somewhat hairier, powdered in dead skin

  but still beautiful, the lost for months

  body of my love.

  Waiting outside

  All day you have been on my mind,

  a seagull perched on an old wharf

  piling by the steely grip of its claws,

  shrieking when any other comes too near,

  waiting for fish or what the tide brings,

  shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

  All day you have been on my mind,

  a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit

  with a perky veil scratching my cheek,

  with a feather hanging down like a broken

  tail tickling my neck, settling its

  big dome over my ears muffling sounds.

  All day you have been on my mind,

  a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,

  wind off the Sahara bearing bad

  news and sand that stifles, roaring

  through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,

  a helmet that clamps me here to bake.

  All day you have been on my mind,

  a steam iron pressing the convolutions

  from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying

  cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable

  with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow

  furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

  Will we work together?

  You wake in the early grey

  morning in bed alone and curse

  me, that I am only

  sometimes there. But when

  I am with you, I light

  up the corners, I am bright

  as a fireplace roaring

  with love, every bone in my back

  and my fingers is singing

  like a tea kettle on the boil.

  My heart wags me, a big dog

  with a bigger tail. I am

  a new coin printed with

  your face. My body wears

  sore before I can express

  on yours the smallest part

  of what moves me. Words

  shred and splinter.

  I want to make with you

  some bold new thing

  to stand in the marketplace,

  the statue of a goddess

  laughing, armed and wearing

  flowers and feathers. Like sheep

  of whose hair is made

  blankets and coats, I want

  to force from this fierce sturdy

  rampant love some useful thing.

  In memoriam

  Walter and Lillian Lowenfels

  Born into history:

  going headfirst through a trapdoor

  from heaven into a river

  of boiling sewage: what we do

  rushes on with cans and bottles.

  The good die still ringing

  to the nails with hope like a fever.

  A friend said of another old man, his war

  is over. She could not understand

  why he is toted about like a talking

  head to demonstrations, press

  conferences, unpacked, propped up.

  I said, his war is mine.

  He wants to be useful as long as he

  can want. He needs freedom to blow

  through him seeking its hard way.

  Struggle wears the bones thin

  as it sings in them, but there is no pension,

  no retirement fund for the guerrilla.

  Alice Paul, old suffragette ailing

  on a poverty ward, commands loyalty

  I can’t deliver my aunt. The French

  feminists who use de Beauvoir’s apartment

  for abortions, are her children. Her best love

  runs flickering in their veins

  altering the faces carved on their genes.

  Walter, Lillian, you were my parents too.

  Poet, communist, anthologist, writer of letters

  of protest to The New York Times, jailbird

  in the ice age fifties for your politics,

  you crowed with life, Walter, in a rustle

  of misfiled Thermofaxed work of poets

  fifty years younger, Black, Native American,

  Quebecois, voices that swarmed in your windows,

  a flight of varicolored warblers escaped singing

  from the prisons of the world. You grew old

  in your craft but never respectable.

  A fresh anger for a new outrage quickened you.

  You did not think Jara in the stadium in Chile

  as they crushed the fingers then the hands

  before they killed him to silence, hurt less

  than your friends shot in Spain in ’38.

  You poured out neat history for aperitifs

  to whet the hunger for dinner to come.

  You heard new voices each morning and fell

  in love catching enthusiasm like a viral fever.

  You roared your old loves, preening, showing

  off for Lillian and sister Nan, hacking up

  a roasted chicken with a cleaver so the drumsticks

  flew while the women pretended terror.

  I miss you, old man. You never gave up.

  Your death caught you still soldiering

  in the war I too will never see finished.

  Goodbye, Walter and Lillian, becoming history.

  Under red Aries

  I am impossible, I know it,

  a fan with a clattering blade loose,

  a car with no second gear.

  I want you to love freely, I want

  you to love richly and many

  but I want your mouth to taste of me

  and I want to walk in your dreams naked.

  You are impossible, you know it,

  holy March hairiness, my green

  ey
ed monster, my lunatic.

  On the turning spit of the full moon

  my period starts flooding down and you

  toss awake. Sleeping with you then

  is spending a night on an airport

  runway. Something groaning

  from the ends of the earth is always

  coming down and something overloaded

  is taking off in a wake of ashes.

  We are impossible, everybody says it.

  I could have babysat in bobbysox

  and changed you. Platoons of men

  have camped on my life bivouacking

  in their war. Now, presumably both adults,

  I am still trying to change you.

  We are cut from the same cloth, you say,

  and what material is that? A crazy quilt

  of satin and sackcloth, of sandpaper

  and chiffon, of velvet and chickenwire.

  I love you from my bones out, impulses

  rising far down in the molten core

  deep as orgasm in the moist and fiery pit

  beyond ego. I love you from the center

  of my life pulsating like a storm on the sun

  shooting out arms of fire with power

  enough to run a world or scorch it.

  We are partially meshed in each other

  and partially we turn free. We are

  hooked into others like a machine

  that could actually move forward,

  a vehicle of flesh that could bring us

  and other loving travelers to a new land.

  The ordinary gauntlet

  In May when the first warm days

  open like peonies, the coat,

  the jacket stay home.

  Then making my necessary

  way through streets I am impaled

  on shish-kabob stares,

  slobbering invitations,

  smutfires of violence.

  The man who blocks my path,

  the man who asks my price,

  the man who grabs with fat

  hands like sweating crabs.

  I grimace, I trot.

  Put on my ugliest clothes,

  layer over sweltering layer.

  Sprint scowling and still

  they prance in ugly numbers.

  I, red meat, cunt

  on the hoof, trade

  insult for insult,