Moon Is Always Female (10 page)

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.