Moon Is Always Female (6 page)

Gourmet, winebibber, you fancy

a good Bordeaux as much

as schlag, but would rather

be petted than eat.

You play Ivan the Terrible

to guests, you hiss and slap

at them to go away. Only

an occasional lover gains

your tolerance if my smell

rubs off on him and he

lets you sleep in the bed.

When I travel you hurtle

about upending the rugs.

When I return you run from me.

Not till I climb into bed

are you content and crouch

between my breasts kneading,

a calliope of purrs.

When I got a kitten a decade

and a half ago, I didn’t know

I was being acquired

by such a demanding lover,

such a passionate, jealous,

furry, fussy wife.

     Cho-Cho

At the Animal Disposal League

you reached through the bars

avid to live. Discarded offspring

of Persian splendor and tuxedo

alley cat, your hunger saved

you, fuzzy and fist-sized.

Now you are sunny, opaque,

utterly beyond words, alien

as the dreams of a pine tree.

Sometimes when I look at you

you purr as if stroked.

Outside you turn your head

pretending not to see me

off on business, a rabbit

in the marshgrass, rendezvous

in the briars. In the house

you’re a sponge for love,

a recirculating fountain.

Angry, you sulk way under

a bed till dragged out whining,

you permit yourself to be

captured and saved. You blink

then your goldengreen eyes

purr and collapse on your back

with paws up and your snowy

white belly exposed all curls

to the plume of your tail.

Ravish me, you say, with kisses

and tunafish because I know

how to accept pleasure. I am

your happy longhaired

id, taking the moment as I

do your finger in my mouth

without breaking its skin,

or eviscerating it instantly

like a mouse.

     Cats like angels

Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;

pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.

People are mostly in between, a knob

of bone sticking out in the knee you might

like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging

over the belt. You punish yourself,

one of those rubber balls kids have

that come bouncing back off their own

paddles, rebounding on the same slab.

You want to be slender and seamless

as a bolt.

               When I was a girl

I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces

all elbows and words and cartilage

ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,

faces to cut the eyes blind

on the glittering blade, chins

of Aegean prows bent on piracy.

Now I look for men whose easy bellies

show a love for the flesh and the table,

men who will come in the kitchen

and sit, who don’t think peeling potatoes

makes their penis shrink; men with broad

fingers and purple figgy balls,

men with rumpled furrows and the slightly

messed look at ease of beds recently

well used.

               We are not all supposed

to look like undernourished fourteen year

old boys, no matter what the fashions

ordain. You are built to pull a cart,

to lift a heavy load and bear it,

to haul up the long slope, and so

am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid

shapely dark glazed clay pots that can

stand on the fire. When we put our

bellies together we do not clatter

but bounce on the good upholstery.

     A new constellation

We go intertwined, him and you

and me, her and him, you and her,

each the center of our own circle

of attraction and compulsion and gravity.

What a constellation we make: I call it

the Matrix. I call it the dancing

family. I call it wheels inside wheels.

Ezekiel did not know he was seeing

the pattern for enduring relationship

in the late twentieth century.

All the rings shine gold as wedding bands

but they are the hoops magicians use

that seem solid and unbroken, yet can slip

into chains of other rings and out.

They are strong enough to hang houses on,

strong enough to serve as cranes, yet

they are open. We fall through each other,

we catch each other, we cling, we flip on.

No one is at the center, but each

is her own center, no one controls

the jangling swing and bounce and merry-

go-round lurching intertangle of this mobile.

We pass through each other trembling

and we pass through each other shrieking

and we pass through each other shimmering.

The circle is neither unbroken

nor broken but living, a molecule attracting

atoms that wants to be a protein,

complex, mortal, able to sustain life,

able to reproduce itself inexactly,

learn and grow.

     Indian pipe

Fragile drooped heads

white as rag paper

raise their funereal grace

ghostly on blanched needles,

year old tattered oak leaves.

The jointed stems suggest

the bones of marionettes.

Chill waxen flowers

blacken as they age

as if with fire.

Saprophytic poor relations

of wintergreen, surely

they embody decadence.

Yet decay is necessary

as the fox’s lunge

bonded as we are

electron and proton,

eater and eaten. All

things have their uses

except morality

in the woods.

     September afternoon
     at four o’clock

Full in the hand, heavy

with ripeness, perfume spreading

its fan: moments now resemble

sweet russet pears glowing

on the bough, peaches warm

from the afternoon sun, amber

and juicy, flesh that can

make you drunk.

There is a turn in things

that makes the heart catch.

We are ripening, all the hard

green grasping, the stony will

swelling into sweetness, the acid

and sugar in balance, the sun

stored as energy that is pleasure

and pleasure that is energy.

Whatever happens, whatever,

we say, and hold hard and let

go and go on. In the perfect

moment the future coils,

a tree inside a pit. Take,

eat, we are each other’s

perfection, the wine of our

mouths is sweet and heavy.

Soon enough comes the vinegar.

The fruit is ripe for the taking

and we take. There is

no other wisdom.

     Morning athletes
     
for Gloria Nardin Watts

Most mornings we go running side by side

two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward

in our baggy improvisations, two

bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.

Men in their zippy outfits run in packs

on the road where we park, meet

like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk

sedately around the corner out of sight

to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.

Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting

but talking as we trot, our old honorable

wounds in knee and back and ankle paining

us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian

and Jew, with our full breasts carefully

confined. We are rich earthy cooks

both of us and the flesh we are working

off was put on with grave pleasure. We

appreciate each other’s cooking, each

other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging

in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze

of young sun, talking over our work,

our plans, our men, our ideas, watching

each other like a pot that might boil dry

for that sign of too harsh fatigue.

It is not the running I love, thump

thump with my leaden feet that only

infrequently are winged and prancing,

but the light that glints off the cattails

as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries

reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines

blacken the sunlight on their bristles,

the hawk flapping three times, then floating

low over beige grasses,

                                  and your company

as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving

tracks in the sand. The geese call

on the river wandering lost in sedges

and we talk and pant, pant and talk

in the morning early and busy together.

     The purge

Beware institutions begun with a purge,

beware buildings that require the bones

of a victim under the cornerstone, beware

undertakings launched with a blood

sacrifice, watch out for marriages

that start with a divorce.

To break a champagne bottle over the prow

of a boat is prodigal but harmless; to break

a promise, a friendship much more exciting

(champagne doesn’t squeal); but doesn’t

the voyage require a lot of sightseeing

and loot to justify that splatter?

Give it up for me, she says, give him

up, give her up, look only in my eyes

and let me taste my power in their anguish.

How much do you love me? Let me count

the corpses as my cat brings home mangled

mice to arrange on my doormat like hors d’oeuvres.

But you know nobody dies of such executions.

Your discarded friends are drinking champagne

and singing off key just as if they were happy

without you. One person’s garbage is another’s

new interior decorating scheme. If she is your

whole world, how quickly the sun sets now.

     Argiope

Your web spans a distance

of two of my hands spread

turning the space between unrelated

uprights, accidental neighbors, fennel, corn

stalks into a frame. The patterned web

startles me, as if a grasshopper

spoke, as if a moth whispered.

The bold design cannot have

a predatory use: no fly,

no mite or wasp caught by its zigzag

as my gaze is. Then I see you,

big, much bigger than I feel

spiders ought to be. Black and gold

you are a shiny brooch with legs

of derricks. I remind you

I am a general friend to your

kind. I rescue your kinfolk

from the bathtub fall mornings

before I run the water. I

remind you nervously we are

artisans, we both make out

of what we take in and what

we pass through our guts a patterned

object slung on the world.

I detour your net carefully

picking my way through the

pumpkin vines. The mother

of nightmares fatal and hungry,

you kill for a living. Beauty

is only a sideline, and your mate

approaches you with infinite

caution or you eat him too.

You stare at me, you do not

scuttle or hide, you wait.

I go round and leave you mistress

of your territory, not in

kindness but in awe. Stay

out of my dreams, Hecate

of the garden patch, Argiope.

     From the tool and die shop

All right, using myself like the eggs,

the butter, the flour measured out

for a cake that in no way recalls

the modest piles from which its golden

sponge was assembled, is my pain

only raw ingredient?

If aches are wrought into artifact,

if spilled blood is read for omens

and my outcries are carefully shaped

for perusal, do I hurt less?

Probably. The effort distracts.

Is art a better aspirin?

The worm decorates its burrows

in tidal silt with bits of shell.

My cat sits washing her fur, arranging

each hair. If she misses a leap,

she pretends she meant to. Art is

part apology, part artifice, part act.

I writhe in pain, bellow want, purr

my sensual ease while the richest part

of what I touched sticks to my fingers.

Words say more than they mean. The poems

turn toward you out of my dirt and the best

know far more than I, far more than me.

     For the young who want to

Talent is what they say

you have after the novel

is published and favorably

reviewed. Beforehand what

you have is a tedious

delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done

after the play is produced

and the audience claps.

Before that friends keep asking

when you are planning to go

out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you

had after the third volume

of remarkable poems. Earlier

they accuse you of withdrawing,

ask why you don’t have a baby,

call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,

take workshops with fancy names

when all you can really

learn is a few techniques,

typing instructions and some-

body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks

a license to hang on the wall

like your optician, your vet