Moon Is Always Female (7 page)

proving you may be a clumsy sadist

whose fillings fall into the stew

but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one

who really writes. Talent

is an invention like phlogiston

after the fact of fire.

Work is its own cure. You have to

like it better than being loved.

Memo to:
Alta, Margaret Atwood, Olga Broumas, Diane DiPrima, Miriam Dyak, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, June Jordan, Faye Kicknosway, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Karen Lindsey, Audre Lorde, Mary Mackey, Honor Moore, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Kathleen Spivack, Alice Walker, and all the rest of us female poets

Subject:
Alternatives to what has become expected

When living resembles airport food;

when the morning paper hands you Chile

with the throat slit; the black children of South

Africa wounded thrashing like fish in a basket,

blood on asphalt the sun dries; when your last lover

announces her conversion to the Reverend Moon

explaining how your impure body impeded her pure mind;

when the second to last lover publishes

his novel in which you sprawl with your legs

spread saying all those things he always

wanted you to say, garish scenes you will have

to live with as if you had lived them

like a candid snap of you

on the toilet for the next twenty years;

when your daughter elopes with an FBI accountant

stealing your only credit card; when your son

shoots sugar and shit; when disdain

mounts you on a colored toothpick

like a smoked clam; when your friends misunderstand

your books and your enemies

understand them far too well;

when you lie alone on the sharp stones of unspoken

retorts fallen in the ravine of garrulous night

in the canyon of echoes where the dead

whisper reproaches; when you are empty of words,

a worm in your own apple,

ignore, ignore that death murmuring at your ear

like a lover far too pretty for you, whose attentions

flatter you, and how people will talk,

you will show them yet if you

but turn your head. Ignore those soft

shapes from the stone cold fog

welling from the back of the throat.

He is not pretty, that boy, only well

advertised. Give your enemies nothing.

Let our tears freeze to stones

we can throw from catapults.

Death is their mercenary, their agent.

He seduces you for hire.

After your death he will pander

your books and explain you.

I know we can’t make promises.

Every work pushed out through the jagged

bottleneck sewer of the industry

is a defeat, mutilated before it’s born.

My faucets drip at night too. I wake

tired. From the ceiling over my bed

troubles spin down on growing threads.

Only promise if you do get too weary,

take a bank president to lunch,

take a Rockefeller with you. Write

your own epitaph and say it loud.

This life is a war we are not yet

winning for our daughters’ children.

Don’t do your enemies’ work for them.

Finish your own.

     THE LUNAR CYCLE

     The moon is always female

The moon is always female and so

am I although often in this vale

of razorblades I have wished I could

put on and take off my sex like a dress

and why not? Do men wear their sex

always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher

all tell us they come to their professions

neuter as clams and the truth is

when I work I am pure as an angel

tiger and clear is my eye and hot

my brain and silent all the whining

grunting piglets of the appetites.

For we were priests to the goddesses

to whom were fashioned the first altars

of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal

in the wombdark caves, long before men

put on skirts and masks to scare babies.

For we were healers with herbs and poultices

with our milk and careful fingers

long before they began learning to cut up

the living by making jokes at corpses.

For we were making sounds from our throats

and lips to warn and encourage the helpless

young long before schools were built

to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.

I wake in a strange slack empty bed

of a motel, shaking like dry leaves

the wind rips loose, and in my head

is bound a girl of twelve whose female

organs all but the numb womb are being

cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,

whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter

of the world girl children are so maimed

and I think of her and I cannot stop.

And I think of her and I cannot stop.

If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.

If you are a man, then at age four or else

at twelve you are seized and held down

and your penis is cut off. You are left

your testicles but they are sewed to your

crotch. When your spouse buys you, you

are torn or cut open so that your precious

semen can be siphoned out, but of course

you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.

For the uses of men we have been butchered

and crippled and shut up and carved open

under the moon that swells and shines

and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant

and then waning toward its little monthly

death. The moon is always female but the sun

is female only in lands where females

are let into the sun to run and climb.

A woman is screaming and I hear her.

A woman is bleeding and I see her

bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts

in a fountain of dark blood of dismal

daily tedious sorrow quite palatable

to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted

that the bread of domesticity be baked

of our flesh, that the hearth be built

of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk,

that we open and lie under and weep.

I want to say over the names of my mothers

like the stones of a path I am climbing

rock by slippery rock into the mists.

Never even at knife point have I wanted

or been willing to be or become a man.

I want only to be myself and free.

I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here

I squat, the whole country with its steel

mills and its coal mines and its prisons

at my back and the continent tilting

up into mountains and torn by shining lakes

all behind me on this scythe of straw,

a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I

wait for the moon to rise red and heavy

in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful

in the dark I wait and I am all the time

climbing slippery rocks in a mist while

far below the waves crash in the sea caves;

I am descending a stairway under the groaning

sea while the black waters buffet me

like rockweed to and fro.

I have swum the upper waters leaping

in dolphin’s skin for joy equally into the necessary

air and the tumult of the powerful wave.

I am entering the chambers I have visited.

I have floated through them sleeping and sleep-

walking and waking, drowning in passion

festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.

I have wandered these chambers in the rock

where the moon freezes the air and all hair

is black or silver. Now I will tell you

what I have learned lying under the moon

naked as women do: now I will tell you

the changes of the high and lower moon.

Out of necessity’s hard stones we suck

what water we can and so we have survived,

women born of women. There is knowing

with the teeth as well as knowing with

the tongue and knowing with the fingertips

as well as knowing with words and with all

the fine flickering hungers of the brain.

     Right to life

SAILLE

A woman is not a pear tree

thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity

into the world. Even pear trees bear

heavily one year and rest and grow the next.

An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting

fruit in the grass but the trees stretch

high and wiry gifting the birds forty

feet up among inch long thorns

broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

A woman is not a basket you place

your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood

hen you can slip duck eggs under.

Not the purse holding the coins of your

descendants till you spend them in wars.

Not a bank where your genes gather interest

and interesting mutations in the tainted

rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest

it to eat or sell. You put the lamb

in the pasture to fatten and haul it in

to butcher for chops. You slice

the mountain in two for a road and gouge

the high plains for coal and the waters

run muddy for miles and years.

Fish die but you do not call them yours

unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.

You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,

fields for growing babies like iceberg

lettuce. You value children so dearly

that none ever go hungry, none weep

with no one to tend them when mothers

work, none lack fresh fruit,

none chew lead or cough to death and your

foster homes are empty. Every noon the best

restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o’clock a
partera

is performing a table top abortion on an

unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid

any longer. In five days she will die

of tetanus and her little daughter will cry

and be taken away. Next door a husband

and wife are sticking pins in the son

they did not want. They will explain

for hours how wicked he is,

how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose

of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood

and every baby born has a right to love

like a seedling to sun. Every baby born

unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come

due in twenty years with interest, an anger

that must find a target, a pain that will

beget pain. A decade downstream a child

screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,

a firing squad is summoned, a button

is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes

flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

not your uranium mine, not your calf

for fattening, not your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold

shares in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you

I want it back. My life

is a non-negotiable demand.

     May apple

UATH

Hawthorn: spines long as my little finger

that glint in the sun before the leaves come out,

small white flowers like the wild rose

and fruits people don’t eat. Virginity.

Not the hymen it took a week to drill through.

All at sixteen I could concentrate on

was what happened how and would it soon

while my mind turned into chewed bubblegum

and my periods racked me like earthquakes.

No, virginity in the old sense of a woman

unmated and not mating: solitude. A state

I have passed in and out of, the nature

of the dreaming mind nobody courts.

State of my cats when they are neither

in heat nor pregnant but predators, players,

brooding elegant gods. Sitting paws folded

and facing they blink courteously

and contemplate mathematical laws.

Eyes alter us by their observant gaze.

We are never the same after someone

has first loved us. The self the other

sees hangs in the mirror at least part time.

The innocence lost is living for myself,

ignorant as a wild hawthorn how to allure,

flatter, please and in what light arrange

the hair and limbs like a bouquet of white

flowers, dark twigs snipped off the tree.

Alone I am clear as clean ice.

I sleep short hours, stop cooking sauces,

and every day like a desert monk I contemplate

death in each apple core and woodash.

Alone I am twelve years old and eighty.

Alone I am sexless as a pine board.

Alone I am invisible to myself as carbon

dioxide. I touch myself often and then less

as my dreams darken into stained glass allegories.

Alone I find old fears preserved like hiking

boots at the bottom of the closet in a box,

my feet having shaped them just perfect to fit

and eight years later I set off in them to climb.

I become nocturnal. My eyes glow in the dark.

The moist rich parts of me contract underground

into tubers. What stands up still is strong

but crotchety, the village witch people come to

with savory troubles, all ears and teeth.