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Moon Is Always Female Page 4


  of the walls of suburban

  villas, so no prowler

  can climb over.

  What closeness remains

  is that of samurai

  in ritual sword dance

  combat, each hoping to

  behead the other and,

  invulnerable and armored, escape.

  Poetry festival lover

  He reads his poem about you,

  making sure everyone in town

  knows you have been lovers

  as if he published his own

  tabloid with banner head

  and passed it out at the door.

  He kneels at your feet as you sit

  a stuffed duck at autographings

  and holds the hand others

  wait to have sign their

  purchased books.

  Alone the last night he asks

  favors (blurbs, readings,

  your name on a folder) but

  not your favor: he wants

  the position but not the work.

  His private parts lie quiet

  and the public is all

  he’s hot to screw.

  Avoid the poet who tells

  his love loudly in public;

  in private he counts his money.

  Complaint

  of the exhausted author

  Pain turns on its dull red warning light

  dim and steady in the dark.

  My back clanks like an old coal furnace.

  My brain is a cellar bin

  empty except for desiccated spiders.

  Even the mice have dropped their neat

  tracks and shipped out.

  Everything I have to burn

  is burned and the house grows cold.

  I remember real hunger,

  the urgency, then the lassitude,

  a hollow pain roaring like a distant sea

  and through it all the sense

  of the body cutting its losses

  of the cells shutting down one by one

  the lights going out.

  That hunger was bone chip sharp.

  Not simple, not of the bargaining flesh,

  this hunger snivels and whines.

  The quaking, tail low but wagging

  cur of the heart

  has desires that hide and abide,

  a lion in yellow dog clothing

  who will, who will be fed.

  Don’t think because I speak strong words

  that I am always strong.

  What moves through me moves

  on and leaves me empty as a storm sewer

  when the rains have gone.

  My ribs squeal like a bad accordion.

  Feed me, mother me. Coddle my fears.

  Or I will go like a mole through the garden

  chewing off roots for spite. I will crawl

  into the rafters and become a leak

  dripping on your chest in bed.

  I will turn into a fat rheumatic yellow dog

  who sprawls all day on the kitchen floor

  in front of the stove in everybody’s way,

  and if you make me move

  I will fix you with a baleful blind eye

  and sigh and limp.

  I will turn into a cough you can’t get

  rid of, or a fog bank

  that broods on the house.

  At night I will take my old form

  and steal to the typewriter

  to write damp querulous poems

  like this one.

  Feed me before it’s too late.

  For strong women

  A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

  A strong woman is a woman standing

  on tiptoe and lifting a barbell

  while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

  A strong woman is a woman at work

  cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,

  and while she shovels, she talks about

  how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens

  the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up

  develops the stomach muscles, and

  she goes on shoveling with tears

  in her nose.

  A strong woman is a woman in whose head

  a voice is repeating, I told you so,

  ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

  ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

  why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t

  you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why

  aren’t you dead?

  A strong woman is a woman determined

  to do something others are determined

  not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

  of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

  a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

  to butt her way through a steel wall.

  Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

  to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

  A strong woman is a woman bleeding

  inside. A strong woman is a woman making

  herself strong every morning while her teeth

  loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

  a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

  every battle a scar. A strong woman

  is a mass of scar tissue that aches

  when it rains and wounds that bleed

  when you bump them and memories that get up

  in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

  A strong woman is a woman who craves love

  like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

  A strong woman is a woman who loves

  strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

  terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

  in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

  she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

  suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she

  enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

  What comforts her is others loving

  her equally for the strength and for the weakness

  from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

  Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.

  Only water of connection remains,

  flowing through us. Strong is what we make

  each other. Until we are all strong together,

  a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

  Apologies

  Moments

  when I care about nothing

  except an apple:

  red as a maple tree

  satin and speckled

  tart and winy.

  Moments

  when body is all:

  fast as an elevator

  pulsing out waves of darkness

  hot as the inner earth

  molten and greedy.

  Moments

  when sky fills my head:

  bluer than thought

  cleaner than number

  with a wind

  fresh and sour

  cold from the mouth of the sea.

  Moments

  of sinking my teeth

  into now like a hungry fox:

  never otherwise

  am I so cruel;

  never otherwise

  so happy.

  The fisherman’s catalogue:

  a found poem

  Orvis nymphs: dark hendrickson,

  leadwing coachman, pale evening dun.

  Cream midge. Grizzly wulff hairwing fly.

  Wet flies: hornberg, quill gordon, ginger quill.

  Weighted nymphs: zug bug, hare’s ear, Ted’s stone fly.

  Caddis pupa of great brown and speckled sedge.

  Pale sulphur dun thorax dry fly, Rat Faced McDougal.

  King’s river caddis downwing fly.

  Silver doctor, green highlander, dusty miller,

  black dose, rusty rat, hairy Mary

  and the salmon muddler. And the popping frog.
r />   Rainy 4th

  I am someone who boots myself from bed

  when the alarm cracks my sleep. Spineless

  as raw egg on the tilted slab of day

  I ooze toward breakfast to be born.

  I stagger to my desk on crutches of strong coffee.

  How sensuous then are the mornings we do

  not rise. This morning we curl embracing

  while rain crawls over the roof like a thousand

  scuttling fiddler crabs. Set off a

  twenty-one tea kettle salute

  for a rainy 4th with the parade and races

  cancelled, our picnic chilling disconsolate

  in five refrigerators. A sneaky hooray

  for the uneven gallop of the drops,

  for the steady splash of the drainpipe,

  for the rushing of the leaves in green

  whooshing wet bellows, for the teeming wind

  that blows the house before it in full sail.

  We are at sea together in the woods.

  The air chill enough for the quilt, warm

  and sweet as cocoa and coconut we make

  love in the morning when there’s never time.

  Now time rains over us liquid and vast.

  We talk facing, elastic parentheses.

  We dawdle in green mazes of conversing

  seeking no way out but only farther into

  the undulating hedges, grey statues of nymphs,

  satyrs and learned old women, broken busts,

  past a fountain and tombstone

  in the boxwood of our curious minds

  that like the pole beans on the fence

  expand perceptibly in the long rain.

  Neurotic in July

  Even desks and tables have edges sharp

  as the blade of a guillotine today.

  The wind gnashes its teeth in the oaks.

  The translucent pearl fog of morning

  is tarnished with my fear. One friend

  dies at home in whatever pitted dignity

  pain allows. Another friend lies dying

  while the doctors in the hall mumble

  their lies unsanctified as white lab rats.

  Another comes out of a coma that almost

  killed him, mischance exploding in the hands,

  while in high glittery summer out on Route 6

  tourists try to drive through each other’s

  bodies. The rescue squad drags their fatigue

  to the third accident today, broken

  glass and broken organs, the stench

  of spilled gas and blood.

  I jerk with anxiety, the reflexes

  of a severed tail. Straw and sleet I am.

  My thoughts spill, the contents of a dash

  board ashtray, butts, roaches, seeds,

  cores, bottlecaps. What I dream stinks.

  Only in political rage can I scorn danger.

  In daily life I quiver like a mass of frog’s

  eggs. Quaking I carry my breasts before

  me like ripe figs a thumb could bruise

  and, Be careful! Be careful! I croon

  all day like a demented cuckoo with only

  one harsh plaintive cry to those I love.

  They pay no attention at all but wander

  freely in and out of danger like sanderlings

  feeding on the edge of the ocean as the tide

  changes, chasing after each wave as it recedes,

  racing before as the wave rushes back.

  Attack of the squash people

  And thus the people every year

  in the valley of humid July

  did sacrifice themselves

  to the long green phallic god

  and eat and eat and eat.

  They’re coming, they’re on us,

  the long striped gourds, the silky

  babies, the hairy adolescents,

  the lumpy vast adults

  like the trunks of green elephants.

  Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

  Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;

  sauté with olive oil and cumin,

  tomatoes, onion; frittata;

  casserole of lamb; baked

  topped by cheese; marinated;

  stuffed; stewed; driven

  through the heart like a stake.

  Get rid of old friends: they too

  have gardens and full trunks.

  Look for newcomers: befriend

  them in the post office, unload

  on them and run. Stop tourists

  in the street. Take truckloads

  to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.

  Beg on the highway: please

  take my zucchini, I have a crippled

  mother at home with heartburn.

  Sneak out before dawn to drop

  them in other people’s gardens,

  in baby buggies at churchdoors.

  Shot, smuggling zucchini into

  mailboxes, a federal offense.

  With a suave reptilian glitter

  you bask among your raspy

  fronds sudden and huge as

  alligators. You give and give

  too much, like summer days

  limp with heat, thunderstorms

  bursting their bags on our heads,

  as we salt and freeze and pickle

  for the too little to come.

  The inquisition

  Did you love him? you stab the old

  photographs. And him? And him? And her?

  Oh, you shrug then. What does it mean?

  Your love comes round regularly as the truck

  that sweeps the streets, welcome but

  hardly monumental. It stirs up the dust,

  it goes on its way, doing some kind

  of temporary good, busy, truculent.

  You were only eight years old then, I say,

  how could I love you if I’d been mean

  and proper, if I’d rationed myself

  like some prescription drug, if I’d frozen

  on grit at the core waiting for the perfect

  sun to melt me. I’m a survivor, a scavenger

  and I make the best I can out of the daily

  disaster, I mold my icons out of newspaper mâché.

  How could you make love to him in an elevator

  you say. But it was a freight elevator

  I say, it went up very slowly, you could lock

  it between floors. Besides that was a decade

  ago, I was more adventurist then. Oh, you say,

  so you wouldn’t fuck me in an elevator, I see.

  I like my comfort better now, I say, but you

  are my only comfort. Have you an elevator in mind?

  Look at this book, you say, you wrote him

  twenty-two love poems. How could you? And publish

  them. They weren’t all to him, I say, I was busy

  that year. And they’re good, aren’t they? Still?

  Oh, so it’s just literature, the ones you write

  me. Words. But I write the truth out of my life

  and if some truths are truer than others in

  the long run, the short sprint makes poems too.

  Listen, you idiot, we’re crawling up the far

  slope of our third year and still sometimes

  I weep after we make love. It is love we make

  and it feeds me daily like a good cow.

  I’m an old tart and you come late and I have

  loyalties scattered over the landscape like lots

  I bought and pay taxes on still, but it’s you

  and Robert I live with, live in, live by.

  Because we work together we are obscurely

  joined deep in the soil, deep in the water

  table where the pure vulnerable stream

  flows in the dark sustaining all life. In dreams

  you walk in my head arguing, we gallop

  on thornapple quests, we lie in
each other’s

  arms. What a richly colored strong warm coat

  is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.

  Arofa

  My little carry-on baggage,

  my howler monkey, my blue-

  eyed sleek beige passion,

  you want a monogamous relationship

  with me. Othella, if you were

  big as me you’d have nipped

  my head off in a fit.

  Gourmet, winebibber, you fancy

  a good Bordeaux as much

  as schlag, but would rather

  be petted than eat.

  You play Ivan the Terrible

  to guests, you hiss and slap

  at them to go away. Only

  an occasional lover gains

  your tolerance if my smell

  rubs off on him and he

  lets you sleep in the bed.

  When I travel you hurtle

  about upending the rugs.

  When I return you run from me.

  Not till I climb into bed

  are you content and crouch

  between my breasts kneading,

  a calliope of purrs.

  When I got a kitten a decade

  and a half ago, I didn’t know

  I was being acquired

  by such a demanding lover,

  such a passionate, jealous,

  furry, fussy wife.

  Cho-Cho

  At the Animal Disposal League

  you reached through the bars

  avid to live. Discarded offspring

  of Persian splendor and tuxedo

  alley cat, your hunger saved

  you, fuzzy and fist-sized.

  Now you are sunny, opaque,

  utterly beyond words, alien

  as the dreams of a pine tree.

  Sometimes when I look at you

  you purr as if stroked.

  Outside you turn your head

  pretending not to see me

  off on business, a rabbit

  in the marshgrass, rendezvous

  in the briars. In the house

  you’re a sponge for love,

  a recirculating fountain.

  Angry, you sulk way under