Moon Is Always Female Read online

  All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,

  Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,

  Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,

  Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:

  the names flesh out our histories, our choices,

  our passions and what we will never embody

  but pass by with respect. When I consecrate

  my body in the temple of our history,

  when I pledge myself to remain empty

  and clear for the voices coming through

  I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.

  Habondia, the real abundance, is the power

  to say yes and to say no, to open

  and to close, to take or to leave

  and not to be taken by force or law

  or fear or poverty or hunger or need.

  To bear children or not to bear by choice

  is holy. To bear children unwanted

  is to be used like a public sewer.

  To be sterilized unchosen is to have

  your heart cut out. To love women

  is holy and holy is the free love of men

  and precious to live taking whichever comes

  and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.

  Praise the lives you did not choose.

  They will heal you, tell your story, fight

  for you. You eat the bread of their labor.

  You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you

  after I went under the surgeon’s knife

  for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet

  an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.

  Then my womb learned to open on the full

  moon without pain and my pleasure deepened

  till my body shuddered like troubled water.

  When my friend gave birth I held her in joy

  as the child’s head thrust from her vagina

  like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.

  Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway

  open to us was taken by squads of fighting

  women who paid years of trouble and struggle,

  who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives

  that we might walk through these gates upright.

  Doorways are sacred to women for we

  are the doorways of life and we must choose

  what comes in and what goes out. Freedom

  is our real abundance.

  Tumbling and with tangled mane

  COLL

  1.

  I wade in milk.

  Only beige sand exists as the floor

  of a slender nave before me.

  Mewing fishhook cries of gulls

  pierce the white from what must be up.

  The fog slides over me like a trained

  snake leaving salt on my lips. Somewhere

  I can hear the ocean breathing.

  The world is a benign jellyfish.

  I float inhaling water that tastes

  of iodine and thin bright blood.

  2.

  We squat on a sandbar digging as the tide

  turns and runs to bury the crosshatched scales,

  the ribs of the bottom as if the ebbing

  of waters exposed that the world is really

  a giant flounder. As we wade landward

  the inrushing tide is so cold

  my ankles ring like glass bells.

  We lie belly up baking as the ocean

  ambles toward us nibbling the sand.

  Out to sea a fog bank stands like world’s

  end, the sharp place where boats fall off.

  3.

  When a storm halts, people get into their

  cars. They don’t start picking up yet, the bough

  that crashed on the terrace, the window

  shattered. No, they rush with foot hard down

  on the accelerator over the wet winding black

  topped roads where the pine and oak start out

  normal size and get smaller till they are

  forests for mice. Cars line up on the bluff

  facing waves standing tall as King Kong,

  skyscrapers smashed before a giant wrecking ball.

  Mad water avalanches. You can’t hear.

  Your hair fills with wet sand. Your windshield

  is being sandblasted and will blind you as the sun

  burns a hole in the mist like a cigarette

  through a tablecloth and sets fire to the air.

  4.

  A dream, two hundred times the same. The shore

  can be red rocks, black or grey, sand dunes

  or barrier reef. The sun blazes. The sky

  roars a hard blue, blue as policemen.

  The water is kicking. The waves leap

  at the shore like flames out of control.

  The sea gnashes snow capped mountains

  that hurl themselves end over end, blocking

  the sky. A tidal wave eats the land. Rearing

  and galloping, tumbling and with tangled

  mane the horses of the surf with mad eyes,

  with snorting nostrils and rattling hooves

  stampede at the land. I am in danger

  yet I do not run. I am rooted watching

  knowing that what I watch

  is also me.

  Making makes guilt. Cold fierce mother

  who gouges deep into this pamet, who

  rests her dragon’s belly on the first rocks,

  older than land, older than memory,

  older than life, my power is so little

  it makes me laugh how in my dreaming

  lemur’s mind making poems or tales or revolution is this storm on a clear day.

  Of course danger and power mingle in all

  birthing. We die by what we live by.

  Again and again that dream comes when I set

  off journeying to the back of my mind,

  the bottom of the library, a joust with

  what is: the sun a fiery spider high

  overhead, the colors bright and clear as glass,

  the sea raging at the coast, always about

  to overrun it, as in the eye of a hurricane

  when the waves roll cascading in undiminished

  but for a moment and in that place the air

  is still, the moment of clarity out

  of time at the center of an act.

  Cutting the grapes free

  MUIN

  In spring the vine looks like a crucified

  witch tied hard to high wires strung

  from weathered posts. Those shaggy tormented

  limbs shall never flow with sap,

  dry as bones the ants have polished,

  inert, resistant as obsidian.

  Then from the first velvet buds tearing

  open the wands stretch bouquets of skinny

  serpents coiling along the wires to bury

  them in rampant swelling leaves, a dense

  fluttering cascade of heavy green over

  the trellis and path, climbing the pine.

  Now the grapes swell in the sun yellow

  and black and ruby mounds of breast

  and testicle, the image of ripe flesh

  rounding warm to the fingers. The wasps

  and bees drone drunken, our lips, our

  tongues stained purple with juice, and sweet.

  We bleed when we blossom from the straight

  grainy pine of girlhood. We bleed when we taste

  first of men. We bleed when we bear and when

  we don’t. Vine, from my blood is fermented

  poetry and from yours wine that tunes my sinews

  and nerves till they sing instead of screeching.

  I do not seek immortality, to be a rock

  which only dissolves in slow motion,

  but to age well like good wine harsh young

  but fit to lay down, the best of me

 
; in the dark of libraries and minds to be taken

  with care into the light and savored.

  I do not seek to leap free from the wheel

  of change but to dance in that turning.

  What depends more on the seasons

  and the years than wine: whether rains come,

  the pounding hail, the searing drought,

  the lethal hoar kiss of the frost?

  In this glass the Mosel pale as straw

  shines with the sun of a spent year

  and pricks my tongue with tiny bubbles

  that were not in it last week. The vines

  of its home are blossoming and the wine

  remembers its natal soil as I must.

  The press of the years bears down

  on us till we bleed from every pore

  yet in our cells sun is stored in honey

  ready to be spilled or to nurture.

  Like wine I must finally trust myself

  to other tongues or turn to vinegar.

  The perpetual migration

  GORT

  How do we know where we are going?

  How do we know where we are headed

  till we in fact or hope or hunch

  arrive? You can only criticize,

  the comfortable say, you don’t know

  what you want. Ah, but we do.

  We have swung in the green verandas

  of the jungle trees. We have squatted

  on cloud-grey granite hillsides where

  every leaf drips. We have crossed

  badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.

  We have paddled into the tall dark sea

  in canoes. We always knew.

  Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow

  of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night

  and not too much Monday morning,

  a chance to choose, a chance to grow,

  the power to say no and yes, pretties

  and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.

  The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows

  like a computer, like a violinist, like

  a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember

  backwards a little and sometimes forwards,

  but mostly we think in the ebbing circles

  a rock makes on the water.

  The salmon hurtling upstream seeks

  the taste of the waters of its birth

  but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile

  trek follows charts mapped on its genes.

  The brightness, the angle, the sighting

  of the stars shines in the brain luring

  till inner constellation matches outer.

  The stark black rocks, the island beaches

  of waveworn pebbles where it will winter

  look right to it. Months after it set

  forth it says, home at last, and settles.

  Even the pigeon beating its short whistling

  wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.

  In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips

  and the moon pulls blood from my womb.

  Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown

  off course yet if I turn back it feels

  wrong. Navigating by chart and chance

  and passion I will know the shape

  of the mountains of freedom, I will know.

  The great horned owl

  NGETAL

  I wake after midnight and hear

  you hunting: that sound seems to lodge

  in the nape like a hollow bullet,

  a rhythmic hooting plaintive as if

  you seduced your prey by pity.

  How you swoop from the dark of the trees

  against the blackest blue sky of the November

  full moon, your wings spread wide as my

  arms, rough heavy sails rigged for a storm.

  The moon blinds me as she glides in ripping

  skeins of cloud. On your forehead you bear

  her crescents, your eyes hypnotic

  as her clock-face disc. Gale force winds

  strip crispened leaves from the branches

  and try the strength of the wood. The weakest

  die now, giving back their bodies

  for the white sheet of the snow to cover.

  Now my cats are not let out after sunset

  because you own the night. After two years

  you return to my land. I fear and protect

  you, come to harry the weak in the long dark.

  Pellets of mouse and bird and shrew bone

  I will find at the base of the pines.

  You have come to claim your nest again

  in the old white oak whose heart is thick

  with age, and in the dead of the winter

  when the snow has wept into ice and frozen

  and been buried again in snow and crusted over,

  you will give birth before the willow buds

  swell and all night you will hunt for those

  first babies of the year, downy owlets shivering.

  Waking to hear you I touch the warm back

  of my lover sleeping beside me on his stomach

  like a child.

  The longest night

  RUIS

  The longest night is long drawn

  as a freight blocking a grade crossing

  in a prairie town when I am trying

  to reach Kansas City to sleep and one

  boxcar clatters after the other, after

  and after in faded paint proclaiming

  as they trundle through the headlights

  names of 19th-century fortunes, scandals,

  labor wars. Stalled between factory

  and cemetery I lean on the cold wheel.

  The factory is still, the machines

  turned off; the cemetery looks boring

  and factual as a parking lot. Too cold

  for the dead to stir, tonight even

  my own feel fragile as brown bags

  carted to the dump. Ash stains the air.

  Wheels of the freight clack by. Snow

  hisses on the windshield of the rented car.

  Always a storm at the winter solstice.

  New moon, no moon, old moon dying,

  moon that gives no light, stub

  of a candle, dark lantern, face

  without features, the zone of zero:

  I feel the blood starting. Monthly

  my womb opens on the full moon but

  my body is off its rhythms. I am

  jangled and raw. I do not celebrate

  this blood seeping as from a wound.

  I feel my weakness summoning me

  like a bed of soft grey ashes

  I might crawl into.

  Here in the pit of the year scars overlap

  scabs, the craters of the moon, stone

  breaking stone. In the rearview mirror

  my black hair fades into the night,

  my cheeks look skeletal, my dark eyes,

  holes a rat might hide in. I sense

  death lurking up the road like a feral

  dog abroad in the swirling snow.

  Defeat, defeat, defeat, tedious

  as modern headstones, regular as dentures.

  My blood tastes salty as tears and rusty

  as an old nail. Yet as I kick the car

  over the icy tracks toward nowhere

  I want to be, I am grinning. Lady, it’s been

  worse before, bad as the moon burning,

  bad as the moon’s horn goring my side,

  that to give up now is a joke told

  by the FBI minding the tap or the binoculars

  staking me out on such a bitter night

  when the blood slows and begins to freeze.

  I grew up among these smoke-pitted houses

  choking over the railroad between the factory

  shuddering and the cemetery for the urban

  poor, and I got out. They say that�
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  what you ask for. And how much more

  I ask. To get everybody out.

  Hecate, lady of the crossroads, vampires

  of despair you loose and the twittering

  bats of sleepless fear. The three-headed

  dog barking in the snow obeys you.

  Tonight I honor you, lady of last things.

  Without you to goad me I would lie

  late in the warm bed of the flesh.

  The blood I coughed from my lungs that year

  you stood at the foot of my bed was sour,

  acrid, the taste of promises broken

  and since then I have run twice as fast.

  Your teeth are in me, like tiny headstones.

  This moon is the void around which the serpent

  with its tail in its mouth curls.

  Where there is no color, no light,

  no sound, what is? The dark of the mind.

  In terror begins vision. In silence

  I learn my song, here at the stone

  nipple, the black moon bleeding,

  the egg anonymous as water,

  the night that goes on and on,

  a tunnel through the earth.

  At the well

  BETH

  Though I’m blind now and age

  has gutted me to rubbing bones

  knotted up in a leather sack

  like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.

  It happened near that well by Peniel

  where the water runs copper cold

  even in drought. Sore and dusty

  I was traveling my usual rounds

  wary of strangers, for some men

  think nothing of setting on any woman

  alone, doctoring a bit, setting bones,

  herbs and simples I know well,

  divining for water with a switch,

  selling my charms of odd shaped bones

  and stones with fancy names to less

  skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,

  a husband, or relief from one.

  The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.

  When I woke up at midnight it had come,

  not he, I thought, not she but a presence furious

  as a goat about to butt.

  Amused as those yellow eyes

  sometimes seem just before the hind