The Hunger Moon Read online

  you are stealing from a woman her own ripe

  sweet desire, the must of her fears,

  the shadow she casts into her own future

  and turning her into a diaper service,

  the cleaning lady of your adventure.

  Who thanks a lightbulb for giving light?

  Listen, your mother is not your mother.

  She is herself and unmothered. It is time

  to take the apron off your mind.

  Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?

  1.

  My old cat lives under a chair.

  Her long fur conceals the sharp

  jut of her fleshless bones.

  Her eyes are dimmed by clouds

  of cataract, visible only

  if you remember their willow green

  as I could judge my mother’s

  by calling up that fierce charred

  brown gaze, smiting, searching.

  When one of the young cats approaches

  she growls in anger harmless

  as distant thunder. They steal her food.

  They do not act from malice.

  They would curl up with her and wash.

  She hisses fear. Her lifelong

  companion died. They appeared.

  Surely the young bear the blame

  for all the changes that menace

  in the fog of grey shapes looming.

  Her senses that like new snow

  had registered the brushstrokes

  of tracks, the fall of a pine needle,

  the alighting of a chickadee;

  that tantalized her with message

  of vole and shrew and rabbit,

  boasting homage her lovers sprayed,

  have failed her like an old

  hanging bridge that decays

  letting her drop through in terror

  to the cold swift river beneath.

  The light is trickling away.

  2.

  One day this week my father called

  briefly emerging from the burrow

  he bought himself lined with nurses.

  He really wants to phone my mother.

  Often he calls me by her name

  but every time I fail him.

  I am the dead woman in body,

  hips and breasts and thighs,

  elbows and chin and earlobes,

  black black hair as at the age

  she bore me, when he still

  loved her, here she stands,

  but when I open my mouth

  it’s the wrong year and the world

  bristles with women who make short

  hard statements like men and don’t

  apologize enough, who don’t cry

  when he yells or makes a fist.

  He tells me I have stolen his stamps

  down in Florida, the bad utopia

  where he must share a television.

  You took my nail scissors, he shouts

  but means I stole his vigor

  deposited in his checkbook like a giant’s

  external soul. I have his checkbook

  and sign, power of attorney,

  as I pay his doctors, doctors,

  doctors, as I hunch with calculator

  trying to balance accounts. We each

  feel enslaved to the other’s will.

  3.

  Father, I don’t want your little pot

  of nuggets secreted by bad living

  hidden in the mattress of Merrill Lynch

  in an account you haven’t touched

  for twenty years, stocks that soared,

  plummeted, doddering along now

  in their own mad dinosaur race.

  That stock is the doctor that Mother

  couldn’t call when she had the first

  stroke, the dress she didn’t get,

  at eighty-six still scrubbing, cooking,

  toting heavy laundry. The dentist

  I couldn’t go to so I chewed

  aspirin as my teeth broke

  at fifteen when I went out to work.

  The ghostly dust bowl roared in the mind

  afterward, the desert of poverty

  where you would surely perish and starve

  if you did not hide away pennies of power,

  make do, make do, hold hard,

  build a fortress of petrified dollars

  stuck together like papier-mâché

  so the tempest of want

  could be shut out to howl at others.

  After she died, you bought Total Life Care,

  a tower of middle-class comfort

  where you could sit down to lunch

  declaring, My broker says.

  But nobody would listen. Only

  Mother had to listen and she is dead.

  You hid alone in your room fighting

  with the cleaning woman who came

  each week but didn’t do it right,

  then finally one midnight wandered out

  naked to the world among rustling

  palms demanding someone make you lunch.

  4.

  You mutter, this was supposed to be fun.

  Do you see your future in the bent

  ones who whimper into their laps,

  who glare at walls through which

  the faces of the absent peer, who hear

  conspiracy mutter in the plumbing?

  I am the bad daughter who could speak

  with my mother’s voice if I wanted,

  because I wear her face, who ought

  to be cooking your meals, who ought

  to be running the vacuum you bought

  her, but instead I pretend

  I am married, pretend to be writing

  books and giving speeches.

  You won’t forgive her ever for dying

  but I heard you call the night nurse

  by her name. Grey blows in

  the fog that took Mother while you slept,

  the fog that thickens between you

  and strangers here where all

  is provided and nothing is wanted.

  The sun blasts on, flat and blatant.

  Everything was built yesterday

  but you. Nobody here remembers

  the strike when you walked the picket line

  joking with sleet freezing your hair,

  how you stood against the flaming wall

  of steel and found the cracked bearing,

  how you alone could make the old turbines

  turn over, how you had the wife

  other men watched when she swayed

  over the grass at the company picnic,

  how you could drink them all witless.

  You’re a shadow swallowed by fog.

  Through your eyes it enters your brain.

  When it lifts you see only pastel

  walls and then your anger standing there

  gleaming like a four-hundred-horsepower car

  you have lost your license to drive.

  from

  Available Light

  Available light

  Ripe and runny as perfect Brie, at this age

  appetites mature rampant and allowed.

  I am wet as a salt marsh under the flood tide

  of the full solstice moon and dry as salt itself

  that draws the superfluous juice from the tissues

  to leave the desiccated butterfly wing intact.

  I know myself as I know the four miles I walk

  every morning, the sky like ice formed on skim

  milk, the sky dappled and fat and rolling, never

  the same two hours later. I know there are rooms

  upon caverns opening off corridors I will never

  enter, as well as those I’ll be thrust into.

  I am six with my mother watching Clippers

  take off for Lisbon. I am nine and the President

  whose voice is a personal god is dying in
the radio.

  I am twelve and coming while I mutter yes, yes,

  of course, this is what the bones grow around to hold.

  I am twenty-four as my best friend bleeds her life out.

  At any moment I find myself under the water of my

  past trying to breathe in that thick refracted medium.

  At any moment a voice is speaking to me like a p.a.

  system that one day amplifies a lecture on newts

  and the next day jazz. I am always finding new

  beings in me like otters swimming in the soup.

  I have friends who gave themselves to Marx, to Freud,

  to A.A., to Christianity or Buddhism or Goddess

  religions, to the Party or the Lord or the Lover.

  As a Jew, I have a god who returns me to myself

  uncleaned, to be used again, since forgiveness must

  be sung but changes not one needle falling from a pine.

  As consequences show their lengthened teeth

  from the receding gums, we hunger for the larger

  picture, the longer view, and yet and yet

  I cannot augment the natural curve of earth

  except by including the moth and the mammoth,

  the dark river percolating through the sea

  built rock, the dense memories of shell

  and sediment, the million deaths recorded

  in each inch; the warm funky breath

  of Leviathan as he breaches off the portside;

  people in boots struggling to shove the pilot

  whales free that a storm surge grounded.

  In winter the light is red and short.

  The sun hangs its wizened rosehip in the oaks.

  By midafternoon night is folding in.

  The ground is locked against us like a door.

  Yet faces shine so the eyes stretch for them

  and tracks in the snow are etched, calligraphy

  I learn by rote and observation, patient

  the way I am finally learning Hebrew

  at fifty, forgiving my dead parents

  who saw squinting by their own scanty light.

  By four o’clock I must give up the woods,

  come in, turn on every lamp to read.

  Later when the moon has set I go out

  and let the spears of Sirius and Rigel

  pierce the ivory of my skull and enter

  my blood like glowing isotopes of distance.

  As I stand in the cold vault of the night

  I see more and fainter stars as my eyes

  clear or my blood cools. The barred owl

  hoots. The skunk prances past me to stir

  the compost pile with her sharp nails.

  A lithe weasel flicks across the cul-de-sac.

  Even the dead of winter: it seethes with more

  than I can ever live to name and speak.

  Joy Road and Livernois

  My name was Pat. We used to read Poe in bed

  till we heard blood dripping in the closet.

  I fell in love with a woman who could ring

  all bells of my bones tolling, jangling.

  But she in her cape and her Caddy

  had to shine in the eyes of the other pimps,

  a man among monkeys, so she turned me on the streets

  to strut my meek ass. To quiet my wailing

  she taught me to slip the fire in my arm,

  the white thunder rolling over till nothing

  hurt but coming down. One day I didn’t.

  I was fifteen. My face gleamed in the casket.

  My name was Evie. We used to shoplift,

  my giggling, wide-eyed questions, your fast hands;

  we picked up boys together on the corners.

  The cops busted me for stealing, milled me,

  sent me up for prostitution because I weren’t

  no virgin. I met my boyfriend in the courts.

  Together we robbed a liquor store that wouldn’t

  sell us whiskey. I liked to tote a gun.

  It was the cleanest thing I ever held.

  It was the only power I ever had.

  I could look any creep straight on in the eyes.

  A state trooper blew my face off in Marquette.

  My name was Peggy. Across the street from the gas-

  works, my mom raised nine kids. My brother-

  in-law porked me while my sister gave birth

  choking me with the pillow when I screamed.

  I got used to it. My third boyfriend knocked me up.

  Now I’ve been pregnant for twenty years,

  always a belly bigger than me to push around

  like an overloaded wheelbarrow ready to spill

  on the blacktop. Now it’s my last one,

  a tumor big as a baby when they found it.

  When I look in the mirror I see my mom.

  Remember how we braided each other’s hair,

  mine red, yours black. Now I’m bald

  as an egg and nearly boiled through.

  I was Teresa. I used to carry a long clasp

  knife I stole from my uncle. Running nights

  through the twitching streets, I’d finger it.

  It made me feel as mean as any man.

  My boyfriend worked on cars until they flew.

  All those hot nights riding around and around

  when we had no place to go but back.

  Those hot nights we raced out on the highway

  faster faster till the blood fizzed in my throat

  like shaken soda. It shot in an arc

  when he hit the pole and I went out the windshield,

  the knife I showed you how to use, still

  on its leather thong between my breasts

  where it didn’t save me from being cut in two.

  I was Gladys. Like you, I stayed in school.

  I did not lay down in backseats with boys.

  I became a nurse, married, had three sons.

  My ankles swelled. I worked the night hours

  among the dying and accident cases. My husband

  left me for a girl he met in a bar, left debts,

  a five-year-old Chevy, a mortgage.

  My oldest came home in a body bag. My youngest

  ran off. The middle one drinks beer and watches

  the soaps since the Kelsey-Hayes plant closed.

  Then my boy began to call me from the alley.

  Every night he was out there calling, Mama,

  help me! It hurts, Mama! Take me home.

  This is the locked ward and the drugs

  eat out my head like busy worms.

  With each of them I lay down, my twelve-

  year-old scrawny tough body like weathered

  wood pressed to their pain, and we taught

  each other love and pleasure and ourselves.

  We invented the places, the sounds, the smells,

  the little names. At twelve I was violent

  in love, a fiery rat, a whip snake,

  a starving weasel, all teeth and speed

  except for the sore fruit of my new breasts

  pushing out. What did I learn? To value

  my pleasure and how little the love of women

  can shield against the acid city rain.

  You surge among my many ghosts. I never think

  I got out because I was smart, brave, hard-

  working, attractive. Evie was brave.

  Gladys and Teresa were smart. Peggy worked

  sixteen hours. Pat gleamed like olivewood

  polished to a burnish as if fire lived in wood.

  I wriggled through an opening left just big enough

  for one. There is no virtue in survival

  only luck, and a streak of indifference

  that I could take off and keep going.

  I got out of those Detroit blocks where the air

  eats stone and melts flesh, where jobs

  dangle and you jum
p and jump. Where there are

  more drugs than books, more ways to die

  than ways to live, because I ran fast,

  ran hard, and never stopped looking back.

  It is not looking back that turned me

  to salt, no, I taste my salt from the mines

  under Detroit, the salt of our common juices.

  Girls who lacked everything except trouble,

  contempt and rough times, girls

  used like urinals, you are the salt

  keeps me from rotting as the years swell.

  I am the fast train you are traveling in

  to a world of a different color, and the love

  we cupped so clumsily in our hands to catch

  rages and drives onward, an engine of light.

  Daughter of the African evolution

  The beauty of the great predators amazes me,

  the music of their sleek haunch muscles rippling,

  the clear fierce gaze with the fire of hunger

  dancing golden in those slitting pupils,

  the way the hawk plays in the columns of air,

  the snow leopard balances leaps with her heavy

  tail among the rocks.

  The grace of the fast grazers dazzles me,

  the gazelle streaking whose hooves seem

  to float over the ground, the stylish striping

  of the zebra, a parade except against their

  proper sun/shade pattern, the storm cloud

  glory of horses, antelope’s skin of velvet dust,

  the calm guilt-provoking gaze of ruminants.

  But I am neither. I honor my mothers,

  scuttling mammals hustling through the brush

  who gobbled through life, a little of this,

  a little of that, a lot of what others left,