The Hunger Moon Read online

  grasshoppers, a nice fat mouse, berries,

  rotten apples to get drunk on, roots

  we dug for, never efficiently. Not special-

  ized to do anything particularly well.

  Those middling animals, the small predators

  like the feral cat always chasing dinner

  and scrambling away from being eaten; the small

  grey fox who picks grapes on the high dunes

  and will steal a melon or a goose. Behold

  my ancestral portraits: shambling field

  apes smallish and chattering, with babies

  hanging on their backs picking over the fruit

  like my grandmother, my mother and like me.

  The answer to all problems

  We aren’t available, we can’t talk to you

  right now, but you can talk to us, we say,

  but think of the astonishment if machines

  suddenly spoke truth: what do you want?

  You’d best have a damned good reason for bothering

  me, intruding on my silence. If you’re bored,

  read a good book. Masturbate on your own time.

  Call weather or your mother or a talk show.

  If you’re a creditor, I’ve just been cremated.

  If you’re my ex, I’m fucking a perfect body

  in Acapulco. Hi, I’m too shy to answer.

  I’m scared of obscene calls. I’m paranoid.

  I’m sharing a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread

  with my lover, our flesh smokes with desire,

  our lips brush, our clothes uncoil hissing,

  and you have a problem? Try prayer.

  Hi obtuse one, it may be eleven on the West Coast

  but it’s two a.m. here and as you listen

  a pitch too high for you to hear is giving

  you herpes and melting your elastic and Velcro.

  Hi, this is the machine. My person is standing

  two feet away to hear if you’re worth the effort.

  Hi. If you hang up without leaving a message

  your teeth will loosen overnight.

  Hi, can my machine call your machine

  and make an appointment? Can my machine

  mate with yours and breed iPods?

  Hi, my humans have been murdered and cannot come.

  After the corn moon

  Swallows thrown from a giant hand turn,

  fleet motes, around each other hurtling

  over the marsh and back. The young

  grown, the flock assembles. On the wire

  neat, formal, they turn sleek heads south.

  Every rambling poison ivy vine burns

  in a few scarlet leaves. Grass tawny

  as lions, the salt meadow has fur now

  rippling over bunched muscles in the wind,

  leaner and raspier than last week,

  hungrier for something to rub, something

  to strip. The robins are drunk on rum

  cherries. The garlic falls over. The rose

  hips redden. Every day we peer at the grapes

  watching them color, puckering sour.

  The houses are all rented and the roads

  jammed with people driving their tempers

  flat out or boiling their brains dry

  in traffic like percolators searing

  good coffee to battery acid.

  Soon they will go home and the ponds

  will clean themselves of soapsuds and the piss

  of psychiatrists’ children and the fried clam

  shacks will put up their shutters and the air

  will smell of salt and pine again.

  This land is a room where a party has gone

  on too long. Nothing is left whole to break.

  As the blowzy embrace of heat slackens

  I long for the feisty bite of cold mornings,

  the bracing smack of the sea wind after

  the first storm, walking the great beach alone.

  The bed of summer needs changing to roughened

  sheets that smell of the line. Fall seeps in

  like energy quickening till it bursts out

  spurting crimson from creeper and tree.

  Even in this heat I walk farther and faster

  hearing the sea’s rising mutter. The birds

  seem all in a hurry. The season of death

  and fruition is nearly upon us. Sometimes

  the knife of frost is a blessing.

  Perfect weather

  On the six o’clock news, Ken poses in his three

  piece blue suit beside the map of fronts.

  Barbie pretends to slap at him. “Now Ken,

  I hope you aren’t going to give us bad weather!”

  “I’m giving you perfect 10 weather, Barbie,

  not a cloud all weekend! Not a storm in sight

  on our Super Weather Radar. Another

  perfect week coming up.” “Oh, thank you, Ken!”

  Gods in the box, they pop out grinning.

  Next will come the announcements of water

  shortages on the South Shore, crop

  failure in the Pioneer Valley, a fire raging

  through the pitch pines near Sandwich.

  Turn on the faucet, Barbie. Think that’s

  manufactured in some plant in Maine?

  Shipped from Taiwan like your microphone?

  It arrives in pellets called rain drops. That’s

  what you call bad and mean it: nasty weather.

  They want a permanent pasted on sun

  to shine over the freeze dried face and the body

  resembling exactly a mannequin in a shop

  window sipping an empty glass on Astroturf.

  That body will never thicken or that face

  admit it liked to smile or frown: wiped memory.

  A permanent now called lobotomy

  under a sunlamp sky, a neon moon, life as a golf

  course unrolled from a truck and every day

  you can play. Everyone you meet has just

  your skin color and income level; the dys-

  functional are removed immediately to storage.

  Service personnel speak another language.

  Death comes as a power failure.

  Ken, how’s supper? Did you know bluefish

  swim? Kiwi grow on trees made of bad weather

  juice? Perrier actually bubbles out of rock?

  Under the carpet under the cracking cement

  below the power lines and the toxic waste stored

  in old mines is molten rock, the hot liquid heart

  of the earth beating, about to erupt

  blowing the clots out of its ancient veins.

  We don’t own the earth, not even the way

  you buy a condo, Ken. We don’t time-share

  here, but live on it as hair grows

  on the scalp, from inside; we are part

  of earth, not visitors using the facilities.

  If the plumbing breaks down, we can’t move out

  to a bigger house. Rain is earth’s blood

  and ours while we swim and life swims in us.

  Pray for rain. Go out on the earth barefoot

  and dance for rain. Take a small

  ceremonial knife and slash your arms

  so the thick red water inside trickles out.

  Piss in the dust. Spit into the wind.

  Go climb a mountain without a canteen to learn

  how the swollen tongue sticks to the palate.

  Then tell us what good weather you’re providing.

  Moon of the mother turtle

  I am the busybody who interferes.

  All through turtle mating season

  I am hauling the females out of the road

  and setting them where I presume

  it is safe to lay their eggs.

  Who appointed me guardian of turtles?

  Yet when I see their bodies broken

/>   like rotten pumpkins on the blacktop

  I get so angry I have no choice but

  to go on dragging them to sandbanks.

  My least favorite duty is the two weeks

  of snapping turtles. Occasionally I grasp

  a weighty female and haul her out

  of the way of cars before she can react.

  Other times it’s a wrestling match,

  me with a stick and she with her beak,

  neither of us prepared to back down,

  a tug-of-war, wrestling, snarling

  in the ruts of the old railroad right-of-way.

  She must, she must. The eggs press

  on her to be born. She is half mad.

  Her eyes glitter dully as sun

  glimpsed through muddy water. She is

  an ancient ancestor raging with the urge

  to dig and lay, dig and lay more.

  I am a yelping dog circling, just as mad

  to get her out of the roadway. She

  hisses like a mother cat. Her great

  beak clacks. She stinks like muck

  from the basement of the fish maker’s shop.

  When finally I get her onto the bank, she

  goes to it at once, sighing. A train

  could pass two feet away as it used to

  and she would lay on. I am forgotten

  as I haul two ties to build her a rampart.

  Then we go our separate ways, me toward

  the bay to complete my four-mile walk,

  she back to Bound Brook, dragging her

  massive belly, each under our compulsions

  like moons with the same and different faces.

  Baboons in the perennial bed

  Even after common sense whittles ambition

  I always order too many seeds, bulbs, corms.

  What’s the lure? Why am I torn between

  cutting the lily for my bedside and savoring

  it daily on its pedestal of crisp leaves?

  They rouse and sate the senses, touch,

  sight, scent, the wild shagginess and precise

  sculpted lines, the shadings of color from clang

  to sigh. Yet I think what moves underneath

  is pleased envy at their flagrancy.

  They wave their sexual organs in the air,

  the plants, colored far more freely than the hind-

  quarters of baboons. We who are raised to shame

  for the moist orchid between our thighs

  must wish we were as certain of our beauty.

  Something to look forward to

  Menopause: word used as an insult,

  a menopausal woman, mind or poem

  as if not to leak regularly or on the caprice

  of the moon, the collision of egg and sperm,

  were the curse we first learned to call that blood.

  I have twisted myself to praise that bright splash.

  When my womb opens its lips on the full

  or dark of the moon, that connection

  aligns me as it does the sea. I quiver,

  a compass needle thrilling with magnetism.

  Yet for every celebration there’s the time

  it starts on a jet with the seatbelt sign on.

  Consider the trail of red amoebae

  crawling onto hostess’ sheets to signal

  my body’s disregard of calendar, clock.

  How often halfway up the side of a mountain,

  during a demonstration with the tactical police

  force drawn up in tanks between me and a toilet;

  during an endless wind machine panel with four males

  I the token woman and they with iron bladders,

  I have felt that wetness and wanted to strangle

  my womb like a mouse. Sometimes it feels cosmic

  and sometimes it feels like mud. Yes, I have prayed

  to my blood on my knees in toilet stalls

  simply to show its rainbow of deliverance.

  My friend Penny at twelve, being handed a napkin

  the size of an ironing board cover, cried out

  I have to do this from now till I die?

  No, said her mother, it stops in middle age.

  Good, said Penny, there’s something to look forward to.

  Today supine, groaning with demon crab claws

  gouging my belly, I tell you I will secretly dance

  and pour out a cup of wine on the earth

  when time stops that leak permanently;

  I will burn my last tampons as votive candles.

  Litter

  I am always forgetting something.

  The kettle boils dry and stinks.

  The tiny green-shouldered tomato plants

  while I’m writing a poem die of thirst

  scorched under the glass of the hotbed.

  I forget birthdays, I forget to call.

  I forget the book I promised to bring.

  I forget where I put my purse, my keys,

  my wallet, my lenses, my love.

  I lose my way in night’s black pocket.

  I can’t think of the name of the goddess

  who stands at the gate blinking her one

  great eye through the fog and the snarling

  wind, sweeping her warning glance across

  where the waves smash themselves kneeling.

  I forget the way my mother laughed.

  I forget her cake, the taste of the uncooked

  dough, the just proportions of cinnamon and sugar.

  I lose the touch of her fingers, stone

  washed smooth by water and laid in the sun.

  I lose the bread smell of my old cat’s fur;

  I lose the name and face of a man just out

  of prison who crawled in my body to hide;

  I lose the addresses of urgent people to whom

  I promised much in towns I have forgotten.

  What happened to my burnt orange shawl?

  My bones are slowly dissolving in salt water.

  It all falls away like feathers, like leaves,

  like sand blowing. In the end I will say,

  I was somebody maybe a woman I forget.

  All the lost words and things and tasks

  I have littered behind me are drifting on winds

  round and up as if gravity had forgotten

  to drop them, and sometimes in the night

  I wake and the name comes to me and I shout

  to the ceiling, Appomattox, rue de Sentier,

  Emily Hannah, 8325 American Avenue,

  metasomatism, two thirds to one,

  and then lilacs, the scent of my mother’s

  white lilacs, thickens the air till I weep.

  The bottom line

  That white withered angel cancer

  steals into a house through cracks,

  lurks in the foundation, the walls,

  litters down its infinitesimal dandruff

  from school ceilings into children’s lungs.

  That invisible fungus hides in processed food,

  in the cereal, the salami, the cake.

  Welcomed into the body like a friend

  it proceeds to eat you from inside,

  parasitic wasp in a tomato worm.

  Out of what caprice quenched in a moment’s

  pleasure does the poison seep?

  We come to mistrust the body

  a slave to be starved to submission,

  an other that can like a rabid dog

  turn on and bite a separate me.

  But the galloping horse of the thighs,

  the giraffe of the spine are innocent

  browsing their green. We die of decisions

  made at 3:15 in boardrooms.

  We die of the bottom line. We die

  of stockholders’ dividends and a big bonus

  for top executives and more perks. Cancer

  is the white radioactive shadow of profit

  fal
ling across, withering the dumb flesh.

  Morning love song

  I am filled with love like a melon

  with seeds, I am ripe and dripping sweet juices.

  If you knock gently on my belly

  it will thrum ripe, ripe.

  It is high green summer with the strawberries

  just ending and the blueberries coloring,

  with the roses tumbling like fat Persian

  kittens, the gold horns of the squash blowing.

  The day after a storm the leaves gleam.

  The world is clear as a just washed picture window.

  The air whips its fine silk through the hands.

  Every last bird has an idea to insist on.

  I am trying to work and instead

  I drip love for you like a honeycomb.

  I am devoid of fantasies clean as rainwater

  waiting to flow all over your skin.

  Implications of one plus one

  Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,

  continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten

  veins of fire deep in the earth and raising

  tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.

  Sometimes your hands drift on me, milkweed’s

  airy silk, wingtip’s feathery caresses,

  our lips grazing, a drift of desires gathering

  like fog over warm water, thickening to rain.

  Sometimes we go to it heartily, digging,

  burrowing, grunting, tossing up covers

  like loose earth, nosing into the other’s

  flesh with hot nozzles and wallowing there.

  Sometimes we are kids making out, silly

  in the quilt, tickling the xylophone spine,

  blowing wet jokes, loud as a whole

  slumber party bouncing till the bed breaks.