The Hunger Moon Read online

Ancient, living, a deep and tortuous river

  that rose in the stark mountains beyond the desert,

  you have gouged through rocks with slow persistence

  enduring, meandering in long shining coils to the sea.

  2.

  A friend who had been close before being recruited

  by the CIA once sent me a postcard of the ghetto at Tetuan

  yellowed like old pornography numbered 17,

  a prime number as one might say a prime suspect.

  The photographer stood well clear of the gate

  to shoot old clothes tottering in the tight street,

  beards matted and holy with grease,

  children crooked under water jugs,

  old men austere and busy as hornets.

  Flies swarmed on the lens.

  Dirt was the color.

  Oh, I understood your challenge.

  My Jewishness seemed to you sentimental,

  perverse, planned obsolescence.

  Paris was hot and dirty the night I first

  met relatives who had survived the war.

  My identity squatted whining on my arm

  gorging itself on my thin blood.

  A gaggle of fierce insistent speakers of ten

  languages had different passports mother

  from son, brother from sister, had four

  passports all forged, kept passports

  from gone countries (Transylvania, Bohemia,

  old despotisms fading like Victorian wallpaper),

  were used to sewing contraband into coat

  linings. I smuggled for them across two borders.

  Their wars were old ones.

  Mine was just starting.

  Old debater, it’s easy in any manscape

  to tell the haves from the have-nots.

  Any ghetto is a Klein bottle.

  You think you are outside gazing idly in.

  Winners write history; losers

  die of it, like the plague.

  3.

  A woman and a Jew, sometimes more

  of a contradiction than I can sweat out,

  yet finally the intersection that is both

  collision and fusion, stone and seed.

  Like any poet I wrestle the holy name

  and know there is no wording finally

  can map, constrain or summon that fierce

  voice whose long wind lifts my hair

  chills my skin and fills my lungs

  to bursting. I serve the word

  I cannot name, who names me daily,

  who speaks me out by whispers and shouts.

  Coming to the new year, I am picked

  up like the ancient ram’s horn to sound

  over the congregation of people and beetles,

  of pines, whales, marshhawks and asters.

  Then I am dropped into the factory of words

  to turn my little wheels and grind my own

  edges, back on piecework again, knowing

  there is no justice we don’t make daily

  like bread and love. Shekinah,

  stooping on hawk wings prying into my heart

  with your silver beak; floating down

  a milkweed silk dove of sunset;

  riding the filmy sheets of rain like a ghost

  ship with all sails still unfurled;

  bless me and use me for telling and naming

  the forever collapsing shades and shapes of life,

  the rainbows cast across our eyes by the moment

  of sun, the shadows we trail across the grass

  running, the opal valleys of the night flesh,

  the moments of knowledge ripping into the brain

  and aligning everything into a new pattern

  as a constellation learned organizes blur

  into stars, the blood kinship with all green, hairy

  and scaled folk born from the ancient warm sea.

  from

  Mars and Her Children

  The ark of consequence

  The classic rainbow shows as an arc,

  a bridge strung in thinning clouds,

  but I have seen it flash a perfect circle,

  rising and falling and rising again

  through the octave of colors,

  a sun shape rolling like a wheel of light.

  Commonly it is a fraction of a circle,

  a promise only partial, not a banal

  sign of safety like a smile pin,

  that rainbow cartoon affixed to vans

  and baby carriages. No, it promises

  only, this world will not self-destruct.

  Account the rainbow a boomerang of liquid

  light, foretelling rather that what we

  toss out returns in the water table;

  flows from the faucet into our bones;

  what we shoot up into orbit falls

  to earth through the roof one night.

  Think of it as a promise that what

  we do continues in an arc

  of consequence, flickers in our

  children’s genes, collects in each

  spine and liver, gleams in the apple,

  coats the down of the drowning auk.

  When you see the rainbow iridescence

  shiver in the oil slick, smeared

  on the waves of the poisoned river,

  shudder for the covenant broken, for we

  are given only this floating round ark

  with the dead moon for company and warning.

  The ex in the supermarket

  I see him among the breakfast foods

  reading labels with a dissatisfied air.

  He looks softened, blurred, as if his body

  had been left underwater too long.

  I reach for that old pain and find it

  discrete, anonymous, mildly bitter

  as aspirin. It dissolves in my blood

  as I try to taste it, leaving a chemical burn.

  The first severed year, I avoided him

  like an open pit of acid that could peel

  the flesh from the skeleton of my pain.

  Each bone would squeal, disjointed, red.

  Now I could walk through him like smoke

  and only sneeze. The pain has dispersed

  into its atoms. Yet in each tiny ball

  is encoded immense violent energy.

  Memory explodes of itself, cracked by a scent

  of mayflower, of hot rubber, of cumin.

  The past ignites in banal words of a pop song,

  burning the walls of the present into gas.

  I cannot walk the dog of the past at my

  convenience. When memory howls gnashing

  at the rusty moon, it does not even sniff at

  that man pondering the peanut butter of his choice.

  Your eyes recall old fantasies

  The Aegean of your eyes—remembered

  spring of thirty years ago

  when you were an abused, drugged child

  and I dragged through Greek villages

  with a man who daily polished his anger

  till it shone whitely as glass

  in the sun, kept it hidden,

  denied, until he buried

  its dagger in my flesh.

  The landscape loved me instead.

  The poppies shouted orgasm.

  The light brushed my bones

  till they glowed secretly,

  cuneiform shapes in the night

  of my despair, an alphabet

  beginning to form that when

  I returned would shape

  poems in my changing voice.

  That sea was clear down to dark

  sharp rocks, the shapes of ancient

  wrecks; teemed with dancing octopi,

  red mullet flashing like glimpses

  of desire teasing me with hope.

  Then the wind roused it to opaque

  fury, thudding like granite

  aga
inst the prow of the boat

  that bore a woman’s staring eye.

  It was the eye of the bold

  sensual woman of the Cretan wall

  paintings who walked bare breasted

  without fear across the goddess’s

  rocky lap. Your joy is too young

  for you, the oracle murmured,

  but I was too young to understand,

  promises etched in my flesh

  in a language I could not yet read.

  Getting it back

  When the guests have gone, the house is twice

  as big. Quiet blows through it like silver

  light that touches every chair and plate

  to the precision of objects in a Vermeer.

  We face each other and slowly begin to talk,

  not making conversation as one plans and then

  cooks a company dinner, but improvising,

  the words spiraling up and out in a dance

  as intricate and instinctual as the choral

  wave of swallows darting on the silken

  twilight pale as a moon snail shell, till between

  us the hanging nest of our intimacy is rewoven.

  How the full moon wakes you

  The white cat is curled up in the sky

  its cloudy tail drawn round its flanks.

  Waking, it struts over the roofs singing

  down chimneys, its claws clicking

  on the roof tiles that loosen and fall.

  Now it runs along the bare boughs of the oak.

  Now it leaps to the beech and sharpens

  its long yellow claws. Sparks fly out.

  The moon is hungry and calls to be fed,

  cries to come into the bedroom through

  the skylight and crawl under the covers,

  to curl up at your breast and purr.

  The moon caterwauls on the back fence

  saying I burn, I am hot as molten silver.

  I am the dancer on the roof who wakes you.

  Rise to me and I will melt you to silk dust.

  I am the passion you have forgotten

  in your long sleep, but now your bones glow

  through your flesh, your eyes see in the dark.

  On owl wings you will hunt through the night.

  The cat’s song

  Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

  My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

  the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

  milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

  Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

  I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

  to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

  Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

  You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,

  says the cat, although I am superior to you.

  Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?

  Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

  Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.

  My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.

  My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings

  walking round and round your bed and into your face.

  Come I will teach you to dance as naturally

  as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.

  I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

  Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

  of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg

  and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

  The hunger moon

  The snow is frozen moonlight on the marshes.

  How bright it is tonight, the air thin

  as a skim of black ice and serrated,

  cutting the lungs. My eyes sting.

  Spring, I watch the moon for instruction

  in planting; summer, I gauge her grasp

  on the tides of the sea, the bay, my womb:

  now you may gather oysters, now lay

  the white, the red, the black beans

  into the earth eyes rolled upwards.

  But winters, we are in opposition.

  I must fight the strong pulls of the body.

  The blood croons, curl to sleep, embryo in a seed.

  Early to sleep, late to rise from the down cave.

  Even at seven night still squats in the pines.

  Swim in the womb of dreams and grow new limbs.

  Awake at last, the body begins to crave,

  not salads, not crisp apples and sweet kiwis,

  but haunches of beef and thick fatty stews.

  Eat, whispers the crone in the bone, eat.

  The hunger moon is grinning like a skull.

  The bats are asleep. The little voles

  streak starving through tunnels in the snow

  and voracious shrews race after them.

  Eat, make fat against famine, grow round

  while there’s something rich to gnaw on,

  urges the crone from her peasant wisdom.

  She wants every woman her own pumpkin,

  she wants me full as tonight’s moon

  when I long to wane. Why must I fight her,

  who taught my mother’s mother’s mothers

  to survive the death marches of winters past?

  For Mars and her children returning in March

  Mars is the name of a female humpback whale

  1.

  To name is not to possess what cannot

  be owned or even known in the small words

  and endless excuses of human speech.

  I have adopted a humpback whale, Mars.

  When I renew my support for whale research

  a photo comes, usually her flukes—

  diving or perhaps slapping the water.

  Fictional bond, sucker bait, gimmick.

  Last winter while humpbacks

  were washing up week by week, she birthed,

  the year of heaviness issuing in life,

  her sisters about her attending.

  So every spring I wait to see if she

  returns, for naming makes valuable to us

  what is unique in itself, one of four hundred

  thirty-five local humpbacks we haven’t yet killed.

  2.

  Jonah in the dark hears the immense heart throbbing

  like a generator. Tours the cathedral of the lungs.

  But now above the sloshing and churning,

  the engine of the heart, he hears the voice of the whale.

  He is inside the organ; the lungs are its bellows.

  Its pipes are fathoms tall. He is a mouse hiding there.

  He is carried inside a tenor the size of a concert hall

  improvising on themes he hears now from all sides,

  clicks, squeaks, moans, trills, it sounds electronic.

  In the night the tones flicker and shimmer,

  nets of sound trailing through the silence

  constellations floating in the salty dark.

  Our prayers rise like clouds of whining mosquitoes

  give me, I want, I need, I must have him,

  her, the heart of my enemy,

  a mountain to strip-mine,

  whales to harvest, while they sing

  a dwindling psalm to the great eye that watches.

  3.

  Arcing out of the grey green moil of water

  the humpback offers her plume of praise,

  steam gusting from the hot stove of her heart.

  They are houses leaping,

  they are ore boats upending.

  Lava flows, they float on the calm.

  Leather icebergs, they are sunning in the current.

  Breaching, now they travel in bow curves,

  viaducts, strong arches of speed,

  huge smooth wheels turning past us.

  Now she rises just
beside the boat,

  thrusting herself out, dark joy towering

  over me where I grip the slippery wet rail.

  Her steam touches my face.

  Her breath enters my nose and my lungs.

  That small vulnerable eye bright like a chip

  of obsidian looks at me, pale—staring in awe.

  4.

  Here on this question mark of sand sprawled

  gracefully on the tumbling sea,

  we know the whales one by one.

  A dead warbler under the leafless bayberry

  may provoke us to pass by with the flash

  of mourning that flesh shudders out its breath

  and turns cold, fading feathers in the brown

  grasses dying back. But a dead whale:

  a shrieking gyre of hungry seagulls turns

  and turns over the heap of it, the eye

  still open and not yet picked out.

  Soon it stinks like a battlefield.

  The bulldozer arrives to labor at burial.

  We see the little as cute, the big as impressive

  although we are oftener killed by viruses

  than by an elephant in must.

  But here the loss is not impersonal.

  Each is known. Beltane, Comet, Point,

  Talon noted among Cape friends dead this cycle.

  We must praise each humpback breaching,

  each a poet, a composer, a scholar of the roads

  below. They are always singing, and what they know

  is as alien to us as if they swam past Sirius.

  Naming turns the crowd into faces,

  turns no-man’s-land into someone’s turf,

  making a stray and starving cat a pet.

  Naming makes a whale who swims through the sea