Moon Is Always Female Read online

  a bed till dragged out whining,

  you permit yourself to be

  captured and saved. You blink

  then your goldengreen eyes

  purr and collapse on your back

  with paws up and your snowy

  white belly exposed all curls

  to the plume of your tail.

  Ravish me, you say, with kisses

  and tunafish because I know

  how to accept pleasure. I am

  your happy longhaired

  id, taking the moment as I

  do your finger in my mouth

  without breaking its skin,

  or eviscerating it instantly

  like a mouse.

  Cats like angels

  Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;

  pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.

  People are mostly in between, a knob

  of bone sticking out in the knee you might

  like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging

  over the belt. You punish yourself,

  one of those rubber balls kids have

  that come bouncing back off their own

  paddles, rebounding on the same slab.

  You want to be slender and seamless

  as a bolt.

  When I was a girl

  I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces

  all elbows and words and cartilage

  ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,

  faces to cut the eyes blind

  on the glittering blade, chins

  of Aegean prows bent on piracy.

  Now I look for men whose easy bellies

  show a love for the flesh and the table,

  men who will come in the kitchen

  and sit, who don’t think peeling potatoes

  makes their penis shrink; men with broad

  fingers and purple figgy balls,

  men with rumpled furrows and the slightly

  messed look at ease of beds recently

  well used.

  We are not all supposed

  to look like undernourished fourteen year

  old boys, no matter what the fashions

  ordain. You are built to pull a cart,

  to lift a heavy load and bear it,

  to haul up the long slope, and so

  am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid

  shapely dark glazed clay pots that can

  stand on the fire. When we put our

  bellies together we do not clatter

  but bounce on the good upholstery.

  A new constellation

  We go intertwined, him and you

  and me, her and him, you and her,

  each the center of our own circle

  of attraction and compulsion and gravity.

  What a constellation we make: I call it

  the Matrix. I call it the dancing

  family. I call it wheels inside wheels.

  Ezekiel did not know he was seeing

  the pattern for enduring relationship

  in the late twentieth century.

  All the rings shine gold as wedding bands

  but they are the hoops magicians use

  that seem solid and unbroken, yet can slip

  into chains of other rings and out.

  They are strong enough to hang houses on,

  strong enough to serve as cranes, yet

  they are open. We fall through each other,

  we catch each other, we cling, we flip on.

  No one is at the center, but each

  is her own center, no one controls

  the jangling swing and bounce and merry-

  go-round lurching intertangle of this mobile.

  We pass through each other trembling

  and we pass through each other shrieking

  and we pass through each other shimmering.

  The circle is neither unbroken

  nor broken but living, a molecule attracting

  atoms that wants to be a protein,

  complex, mortal, able to sustain life,

  able to reproduce itself inexactly,

  learn and grow.

  Indian pipe

  Fragile drooped heads

  white as rag paper

  raise their funereal grace

  ghostly on blanched needles,

  year old tattered oak leaves.

  The jointed stems suggest

  the bones of marionettes.

  Chill waxen flowers

  blacken as they age

  as if with fire.

  Saprophytic poor relations

  of wintergreen, surely

  they embody decadence.

  Yet decay is necessary

  as the fox’s lunge

  bonded as we are

  electron and proton,

  eater and eaten. All

  things have their uses

  except morality

  in the woods.

  September afternoon

  at four o’clock

  Full in the hand, heavy

  with ripeness, perfume spreading

  its fan: moments now resemble

  sweet russet pears glowing

  on the bough, peaches warm

  from the afternoon sun, amber

  and juicy, flesh that can

  make you drunk.

  There is a turn in things

  that makes the heart catch.

  We are ripening, all the hard

  green grasping, the stony will

  swelling into sweetness, the acid

  and sugar in balance, the sun

  stored as energy that is pleasure

  and pleasure that is energy.

  Whatever happens, whatever,

  we say, and hold hard and let

  go and go on. In the perfect

  moment the future coils,

  a tree inside a pit. Take,

  eat, we are each other’s

  perfection, the wine of our

  mouths is sweet and heavy.

  Soon enough comes the vinegar.

  The fruit is ripe for the taking

  and we take. There is

  no other wisdom.

  Morning athletes

  for Gloria Nardin Watts

  Most mornings we go running side by side

  two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward

  in our baggy improvisations, two

  bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.

  Men in their zippy outfits run in packs

  on the road where we park, meet

  like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk

  sedately around the corner out of sight

  to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.

  Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting

  but talking as we trot, our old honorable

  wounds in knee and back and ankle paining

  us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian

  and Jew, with our full breasts carefully

  confined. We are rich earthy cooks

  both of us and the flesh we are working

  off was put on with grave pleasure. We

  appreciate each other’s cooking, each

  other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging

  in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze

  of young sun, talking over our work,

  our plans, our men, our ideas, watching

  each other like a pot that might boil dry

  for that sign of too harsh fatigue.

  It is not the running I love, thump

  thump with my leaden feet that only

  infrequently are winged and prancing,

  but the light that glints off the cattails

  as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries

  reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines

  blacken the sunlight on their bristles,

  the hawk flapping three times, then floating

  low over beige grasses,

  and your company


  as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving

  tracks in the sand. The geese call

  on the river wandering lost in sedges

  and we talk and pant, pant and talk

  in the morning early and busy together.

  The purge

  Beware institutions begun with a purge,

  beware buildings that require the bones

  of a victim under the cornerstone, beware

  undertakings launched with a blood

  sacrifice, watch out for marriages

  that start with a divorce.

  To break a champagne bottle over the prow

  of a boat is prodigal but harmless; to break

  a promise, a friendship much more exciting

  (champagne doesn’t squeal); but doesn’t

  the voyage require a lot of sightseeing

  and loot to justify that splatter?

  Give it up for me, she says, give him

  up, give her up, look only in my eyes

  and let me taste my power in their anguish.

  How much do you love me? Let me count

  the corpses as my cat brings home mangled

  mice to arrange on my doormat like hors d’oeuvres.

  But you know nobody dies of such executions.

  Your discarded friends are drinking champagne

  and singing off key just as if they were happy

  without you. One person’s garbage is another’s

  new interior decorating scheme. If she is your

  whole world, how quickly the sun sets now.

  Argiope

  Your web spans a distance

  of two of my hands spread

  turning the space between unrelated

  uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn

  stalks into a frame. The patterned web

  startles me, as if a grasshopper

  spoke, as if a moth whispered.

  The bold design cannot have

  a predatory use: no fly,

  no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag

  as my gaze is. Then I see you,

  big, much bigger than I feel

  spiders ought to be. Black and gold

  you are a shiny brooch with legs

  of derricks. I remind you

  I am a general friend to your

  kind. I rescue your kinfolk

  from the bathtub fall mornings

  before I run the water. I

  remind you nervously we are

  artisans, we both make out

  of what we take in and what

  we pass through our guts a patterned

  object slung on the world.

  I detour your net carefully

  picking my way through the

  pumpkin vines. The mother

  of nightmares fatal and hungry,

  you kill for a living. Beauty

  is only a sideline, and your mate

  approaches you with infinite

  caution or you eat him too.

  You stare at me, you do not

  scuttle or hide, you wait.

  I go round and leave you mistress

  of your territory, not in

  kindness but in awe. Stay

  out of my dreams, Hecate

  of the garden patch, Argiope.

  From the tool and die shop

  All right, using myself like the eggs,

  the butter, the flour measured out

  for a cake that in no way recalls

  the modest piles from which its golden

  sponge was assembled, is my pain

  only raw ingredient?

  If aches are wrought into artifact,

  if spilled blood is read for omens

  and my outcries are carefully shaped

  for perusal, do I hurt less?

  Probably. The effort distracts.

  Is art a better aspirin?

  The worm decorates its burrows

  in tidal silt with bits of shell.

  My cat sits washing her fur, arranging

  each hair. If she misses a leap,

  she pretends she meant to. Art is

  part apology, part artifice, part act.

  I writhe in pain, bellow want, purr

  my sensual ease while the richest part

  of what I touched sticks to my fingers.

  Words say more than they mean. The poems

  turn toward you out of my dirt and the best

  know far more than I, far more than me.

  For the young who want to

  Talent is what they say

  you have after the novel

  is published and favorably

  reviewed. Beforehand what

  you have is a tedious

  delusion, a hobby like knitting.

  Work is what you have done

  after the play is produced

  and the audience claps.

  Before that friends keep asking

  when you are planning to go

  out and get a job.

  Genius is what they know you

  had after the third volume

  of remarkable poems. Earlier

  they accuse you of withdrawing,

  ask why you don’t have a baby,

  call you a bum.

  The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

  take workshops with fancy names

  when all you can really

  learn is a few techniques,

  typing instructions and some-

  body else’s mannerisms

  is that every artist lacks

  a license to hang on the wall

  like your optician, your vet

  proving you may be a clumsy sadist

  whose fillings fall into the stew

  but you’re certified a dentist.

  The real writer is one

  who really writes. Talent

  is an invention like phlogiston

  after the fact of fire.

  Work is its own cure. You have to

  like it better than being loved.

  Memo to: Alta, Margaret Atwood, Olga Broumas, Diane DiPrima, Miriam Dyak, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, June Jordan, Faye Kicknosway, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Karen Lindsey, Audre Lorde, Mary Mackey, Honor Moore, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Kathleen Spivack, Alice Walker, and all the rest of us female poets

  Subject: Alternatives to what has become expected

  When living resembles airport food;

  when the morning paper hands you Chile

  with the throat slit; the black children of South

  Africa wounded thrashing like fish in a basket,

  blood on asphalt the sun dries; when your last lover

  announces her conversion to the Reverend Moon

  explaining how your impure body impeded her pure mind;

  when the second to last lover publishes

  his novel in which you sprawl with your legs

  spread saying all those things he always

  wanted you to say, garish scenes you will have

  to live with as if you had lived them

  like a candid snap of you

  on the toilet for the next twenty years;

  when your daughter elopes with an FBI accountant

  stealing your only credit card; when your son

  shoots sugar and shit; when disdain

  mounts you on a colored toothpick

  like a smoked clam; when your friends misunderstand

  your books and your enemies

  understand them far too well;

  when you lie alone on the sharp stones of unspoken

  retorts fallen in the ravine of garrulous night

  in the canyon of echoes where the dead

  whisper reproaches; when you are empty of words,

  a worm in your own apple,

  ignore, ignore that death murmuring at your ear

  like a lover far too pretty for you, whose attentions

  flatter you, and how people will talk,

&
nbsp; you will show them yet if you

  but turn your head. Ignore those soft

  shapes from the stone cold fog

  welling from the back of the throat.

  He is not pretty, that boy, only well

  advertised. Give your enemies nothing.

  Let our tears freeze to stones

  we can throw from catapults.

  Death is their mercenary, their agent.

  He seduces you for hire.

  After your death he will pander

  your books and explain you.

  I know we can’t make promises.

  Every work pushed out through the jagged

  bottleneck sewer of the industry

  is a defeat, mutilated before it’s born.

  My faucets drip at night too. I wake

  tired. From the ceiling over my bed

  troubles spin down on growing threads.

  Only promise if you do get too weary,

  take a bank president to lunch,

  take a Rockefeller with you. Write

  your own epitaph and say it loud.

  This life is a war we are not yet

  winning for our daughters’ children.

  Don’t do your enemies’ work for them.

  Finish your own.

  THE LUNAR CYCLE

  The moon is always female

  The moon is always female and so

  am I although often in this vale

  of razorblades I have wished I could

  put on and take off my sex like a dress

  and why not? Do men wear their sex

  always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher

  all tell us they come to their professions

  neuter as clams and the truth is

  when I work I am pure as an angel

  tiger and clear is my eye and hot

  my brain and silent all the whining

  grunting piglets of the appetites.

  For we were priests to the goddesses

  to whom were fashioned the first altars

  of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal

  in the wombdark caves, long before men

  put on skirts and masks to scare babies.

  For we were healers with herbs and poultices

  with our milk and careful fingers

  long before they began learning to cut up