Moon Is Always Female Read online

  legs kick hard.

  The angel struck me

  and we wrestled all that night.

  My dust-stained gristle of a body

  clad in proper village black

  was pushed against him

  and his fiery chest

  fell through me like a star.

  Raw with bruises, with my muscles

  sawing like donkey’s brays,

  I thought fighting can be

  making love. Then in the grey

  placental dawn I saw.

  “I know you now, face

  on a tree of fire

  with eyes of my youngest sweetest

  dead, face

  I saw in the mirror

  right after my first child

  was born—before it failed—

  when I was beautiful.

  Whatever you are, whatever

  I’ve won a blessing

  from you. Bless me!”

  The angel, “Yes, we have met

  at doors thrust open to an empty room,

  a garden, or a pit.

  My gifts have human faces

  hieroglyphs that command

  you without yielding what they mean.

  Cast yourself

  and I will bless your cast

  till your bones are dice

  for the wind to roll.

  I am the demon of beginnings

  for those who leap their thresholds

  and let the doors swing shut.”

  My hair bristling, I stood.

  “Get away from me, old

  enemy. I know the lying

  radiance of that face:

  my friend, my twin, my

  lover I trusted as the fish

  the water, who left me

  carrying his child.

  The man who bought me

  with his strength and beat

  me for his weakness.

  The girl I saved who turned

  and sold her skin

  for an easy bed in a house

  of slaves. The boy fresh

  as a willow sapling

  smashed on the stones of war.”

  “I am the spirit of hinges,

  the fever that lives in dice

  and cards, what is picked

  up and thrown down. I am

  the new that is ancient,

  the hope that hurts,

  what begins in what has ended.

  Mine is the double vision

  that everything is sacred, and trivial,

  the laughter that bubbles in blood,

  and I love the blue beetle

  clicking in the grass as much

  as you. Shall I bless you,

  child and crone?”

  “What has plucked the glossy

  pride of hair from my scalp,

  loosened my teeth in their sockets,

  wrung my breasts dry as gullies,

  rubbed ashes into my sleep

  but chasing you?

  Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.

  Get from me

  wielder of the heart’s mirages.

  I will follow you to no more graves.”

  I spat

  and she gathered her tall shuddering wings

  and scaled the streaks of the dawn

  a hawk on fire soaring

  and I stood there and could hear the water burbling

  and raised my hand

  before my face and groped:

  Why has the sun gone out?

  Why is it dark?

  White on black

  LUIS

  They say the year begins in January, but it

  feels like the same old year to me. Things

  give out now, the cabbages rot, the rent

  in the coat sleeve’s too worn to be mended,

  the boot finally admits it leaks, the candle

  nub gutters out with a banner of pungent smoke.

  The cracked dish of the frozen moon lights

  the snow far longer than the old fox of the sun

  that can hardly scale the hill, that crawls

  feebly into the lower branches of the pine

  and drops to earth exhausted.

  Little sister

  of the moon you prance on the ice with

  delicate black feet. Your eyes shine red.

  You comb your long tail and plume it out.

  You mate under the porch. With sharp claws

  you dig up the compost and scavenge the dump.

  The air is crystal up to the ice splinters

  of stars but you raise the quickest warm

  nose in the woods, long, sharp as your hunger.

  In the path you wait for me to give way.

  Often you die bloody in the road because

  you expect deference. The wise dog looks

  the other way when you cross his yard.

  The stupid dog never bothers you twice.

  Little sister, mostly when we meet we bow

  rather formally and go our ways, me

  first. I read in a book that perhaps if one

  lifted you by your tail, you could not spray

  or perhaps you could. I envision a man

  in a space suit lumbering over the plain

  of the Herring River to catch and lift

  you in the name of science. Then the space

  suit would be burned perhaps or perhaps

  not. My cats and I sit in the darkened

  livingroom watching through the glass

  as you dance and nibble, your long fur

  sweeping the snow and your nailed feet quick.

  Another country

  NION

  When I visited with the porpoises

  I felt awkward, my hairy

  angular body sprouting its skinny

  grasping limbs like long mistakes.

  The child of gravity and want I sank

  in the salt wave clattering with gadgets,

  appendages. Millennia past

  they turned and fled back to the womb.

  There they feel no fatigue but slip

  through the water caressed and buoyed up.

  Never do they sleep but their huge brains

  hold life always turning it like a pebble

  under the tongue, and lacking practice, death

  comes as an astonishment.

  In the wide murmur of the sea they fear

  little. Together they ram the shark.

  Food swims flashing in schools.

  Hunger is only a teasing, endured

  no longer than desired. Weather

  is superficial decoration; they rise

  to salute the thunder, romping their tails.

  They ride through pleasure and plenty

  secure in a vast courtesy

  firm enough to sustain a drowning man.

  Nothing is said bluntly.

  All conversation is a singing,

  all telling alludes to and embodies

  minute displacements in epic,

  counter-epic, comic opera, or the four hundred

  forty-one other genres they recognize

  as current. Every exchange comes

  as aria, lyric, set piece, recitativo,

  and even a cry for help is couched

  in a form brief and terse,

  strict as haiku.

  Greed has no meaning when no one

  is hungry. Thus they swim toward

  us with broad grins and are slaughtered

  by the factory ships

  that harvest the tuna like wheat.

  Crescent moon like a canoe

  FEARN

  This month you carried me late and heavy

  in your belly and finally near Tuesday

  midnight you gave me light and life, the season

  Kore returns to Demeter, and you suffer

  and I cannot save you though I burn with dreams.

  Memories the color of old blood,

  scraps of velvet gowns,
lace, chiffon veils,

  your sister’s stage costumes (Ziegfeld

  didn’t stint) we lingered together, you

  padding in sneakers and wash-worn housedresses.

  You grew celery by tucking sliced off

  bottoms in the soil. You kept a compost

  pile in 1940. Your tomatoes glowed

  like traffic signals in the table-sized yard.

  Don’t kill spiders, you warned.

  In an asbestos box in Detroit where sputtering

  factories yellow the air, where sheets

  on the line turn ashen, you nurtured

  a backyard jungle. Every hungry cat

  wanted to enter and every child.

  You who had not been allowed to finish

  tenth grade but sent to be a frightened

  chambermaid, carried home every week

  armloads of books from the library

  rummaging them late at night, insomniac,

  riffling the books like boxes of chocolates

  searching for the candied cherries, the nuts,

  hunting for the secrets, the formulae,

  the knowledge those others learned

  that made them shine and never ache.

  You were taught to feel stupid; you

  were made to feel dirty; you were

  forced to feel helpless; you were trained

  to feel lost, uprooted, terrified.

  You could not love yourself or me.

  Dreamer of fables that hid their own

  endings, kitchen witch, reader of palms,

  you gave me gifts and took them back

  but the real ones boil in the blood

  and swell in the breasts, furtive, strong.

  You gave me hands that can pick up

  a wild bird so that the bird relaxes,

  turns and stares. I have handled

  fifty stunned and injured birds and killed

  only two through clumsiness, with your touch.

  You taught me to see the scale on the bird

  leg, the old woman’s scalp pink as a rose

  under the fluff, the golden flecks in the iris

  of your eye, the silver underside of leaves

  blown back. I am your poet, mother.

  You did not want the daughter you got.

  You wanted a girl to flirt as you did

  and marry as you had and chew the same

  sour coughed up cud, yet you wanted too

  to birth a witch, a revenger, a sword

  of hearts who would do all the things

  you feared. Don’t do it, they’ll kill

  you, you’re bad, you said, slapping me down

  hard but always you whispered, I could have!

  Only rebellion flashes like lightning.

  I wanted to take you with me, you don’t

  remember. We fought like snakes, biting

  hard at each other’s spine to snap free.

  You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries,

  snuffed my panties looking for smudge of sex,

  so I took off and never came back. You can’t

  imagine how I still long to save you,

  to carry you off, who can’t trust me

  to make coffee, but your life and mine pass

  in different centuries, under altered suns.

  I see your blood soaking into the linoleum,

  I see you twisted, a mop some giant hand

  is wringing out. Pain in the careless joke

  and shouted insult and knotted fist. Pain like knives

  and forks set out on the domestic table.

  You look to men for salvation and every year

  finds you more helpless. Do I battle

  for other women, myself included,

  because I can not give you anything

  you want? I can not midwife you free.

  In my childhood bed we float, your sweet

  husky voice singing about the crescent

  moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would

  climb into like a boat and row away

  and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.

  In the land where the moon hides, mothers

  and daughters hold each other tenderly.

  There is no male law at five o’clock.

  Our sameness and our difference do not clash

  metal on metal but we celebrate and learn.

  My muse, your voice on the phone wavers with tears.

  The life you gave me burns its acetylene

  of buried anger, unused talents, rotted wishes,

  the compost of discontent, flaring into words

  strong for other women under your waning moon.

  O!

  Oh, the golden bauble of your rising

  wet from the waves rippling,

  radiating like orgasm, round

  as a singing mouth at full stretch,

  round as the vagina when it takes,

  round as a full belly, round

  as a baby’s head, you come to us

  riding over the white manes

  of the waves, walking on their backs

  like a circus rider. Hoop

  of cool fire, goose egg,

  silver mirror in which we see

  ourselves dimly but truly reflected,

  our blood is salty water

  you tug at, drawing us.

  Red onion, I peel you layer

  by layer and weep. The nights

  carve you and then you swell

  again, lady of the wild animals

  whose homes are paved and poisoned,

  lady of the furry mammals at teat

  and the shimmering fish whose sides

  echo you, of those who hunt for roots

  and berries, hunt for the island

  in the sea where love rules and women

  are free to wax and wane and wander

  in the sweet strict seasons

  of our desires and needs.