Moon Is Always Female (8 page)

     Shadows of the burning

DUIR

Oak burns steady and hot and long

and fires of oak are traditional tonight

but we light a fire of pitch pine

which burns well enough in the salt wind

whistling while ragged flames lick the dark

casting our shadows high as the dunes.

Come into the fire and catch,

come in, come in. Fire that burns

and leaves entire, the silver flame

of the moon, trembling mercury laying

on the waves a highway to the abyss,

the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith

of the year and potency, midsummer’s eve.

Come dance in the fire, come in.

This is the briefest night and just

under the ocean the fires of the sun

roll toward us. Already your skin is dark,

already your wiry curls are tipped with gold

and my black hair begins to redden.

How often I have leapt into that fire,

how often burned like a torch, my hair

streaming sparks, and wakened to weep

ashes. I have said, love is a downer we take,

love is a habit like sucking on death tit cigarettes,

love is a bastard art. Instead of painting

or composing, we compose a beloved.

When you love for a living, I have said,

you’re doomed to early retirement without benefits.

For women have died and worms have eaten them

and just for love. Love of the wrong man or

the right. Death from abortion, from the first

child or the eighteenth, death at the stake

for loving a woman or freedom or the wrong

deity. Death at the open end of a gun

from a jealous man, a vengeful man,

Othello’s fingers, Henry’s ax.

It is romance I loathe, the swooning moon

of June which croons to the tune of every goon.

Venus on the half shell without the reek

of seaweed preferred to Artemis of the rows

of breasts like a sow and the bow

ready in her hand that kills and the herbs

that save in childbirth.

Ah, my name hung once like a can

on an ink stained girl blue as skim milk

lumpy with elbows, spiky with scruples,

who knelt in a tower raised of Shelley’s bones

praying my demon lover asceticism

to grant one icy vision.

I found my body in the arms of lovers

and woke in the flesh alive, astounded

like a corpse sitting up in a judgment

day painting. My own five hound senses

turned on me, chased me, tore me

head from trunk. Thumb and liver

and jaw on the bloody hillside

twanged like frogs in the night I am alive!

A succession of lovers like a committee

of Congress in slow motion put me back

together, a thumb under my ear, the ear

in an armpit, the head sprouting feet.

Kaleidoscope where glass sparks pierced

my eyes, in love’s funhouse I was hung

a mirror of flesh reflecting flaccid ideas

of men scouting their mothers through my womb,

a labyrinth of years in other

people’s thoroughly furnished rooms.

I built myself like a house a poor family

puts up in the country: first the foundation

under a tarred flat roof like a dugout,

then the well in the spring and you get

electricity connected and maybe the next

fall you seal in two rooms and add some

plumbing but all the time you’re living

there constructing your way out of a slum.

Yet for whom is this built if not to be shared

with the quick steps and low voice of love?

I cherish friendship and loving that starts

in liking but the body is the church

where I praise and bless and am blessed.

My strength and my weakness are twins

in the same womb, mirrored dancers under

water, the dark and light side of the moon.

I know how truly my seasons have turned

cold and hot

around that lion-bodied sun.

Come step into the fire, come in,

come in, dance in the flames of the festival

of the strongest sun at the mountain top

of the year when the wheel starts down.

Dance through me as I through you.

Here in the heart of fire in the caves

of the ancient body we are aligned

with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming

in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams

who drink the tide and the heartwood clock

of the oak and the astronomical clock

in the blood thundering through the great heart

of the albatross. Our cells are burning

each a little furnace powered by the sun

and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.

This night the sun and moon dance

and you and I dance in the fire of which

we are the logs, the matches and the flames.

     The sabbath of mutual respect

TINNE

In the natural year come two thanksgivings,

the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall,

two times when we eat and drink and remember our dead

under the golden basin of the moon of plenty.

Abundance, Habondia, food for the winter,

too much now and survival later. After

the plant bears, it dies into seed.

The blowing grasses nourish us, wheat

and corn and rye, millet and rice, oat

and barley and buckwheat, all the serviceable

grasses of the pasture that the cow grazes,

the lamb, the horse, the goat; the grasses

that quicken into meat and milk and cheese,

the humble necessary mute vegetable bees,

the armies of the grasses waving their

golden banners of ripe seed.

                                             The sensual

round fruit that gleams with the sun

stored in its sweetness.

                                  The succulent

ephemera of the summer garden, bloodwarm

tomatoes, tender small squash, crisp

beans, the milky corn, the red peppers

exploding like roman candles in the mouth.

We praise abundance by eating of it,

reveling in choice on a table set with roses

and lilies and phlox, zucchini and lettuce

and eggplant before the long winter

of root crops.

                   Fertility and choice:

every row dug in spring means weeks

of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings

choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.

The goddess of abundance Habondia is also

the spirit of labor and choice.

                                            In another

life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat

children. In another life, my sister, I too

would love another woman and raise one child

together as if that pushed from both our wombs.

In another life, sister, I too would dwell

solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks

or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.

Praise all our choices. Praise any woman

who chooses, and make safe her choice.

Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,

Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,

Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us

All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,

Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,

Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,

Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:

the names flesh out our histories, our choices,

our passions and what we will never embody

but pass by with respect. When I consecrate

my body in the temple of our history,

when I pledge myself to remain empty

and clear for the voices coming through

I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.

Habondia, the real abundance, is the power

to say yes and to say no, to open

and to close, to take or to leave

and not to be taken by force or law

or fear or poverty or hunger or need.

To bear children or not to bear by choice

is holy. To bear children unwanted

is to be used like a public sewer.

To be sterilized unchosen is to have

your heart cut out. To love women

is holy and holy is the free love of men

and precious to live taking whichever comes

and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.

Praise the lives you did not choose.

They will heal you, tell your story, fight

for you. You eat the bread of their labor.

You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you

after I went under the surgeon’s knife

for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet

an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.

Then my womb learned to open on the full

moon without pain and my pleasure deepened

till my body shuddered like troubled water.

When my friend gave birth I held her in joy

as the child’s head thrust from her vagina

like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.

Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway

open to us was taken by squads of fighting

women who paid years of trouble and struggle,

who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives

that we might walk through these gates upright.

Doorways are sacred to women for we

are the doorways of life and we must choose

what comes in and what goes out. Freedom

is our real abundance.

     Tumbling and with tangled mane

COLL

1.

I wade in milk.

Only beige sand exists as the floor

of a slender nave before me.

Mewing fishhook cries of gulls

pierce the white from what must be up.

The fog slides over me like a trained

snake leaving salt on my lips. Somewhere

I can hear the ocean breathing.

The world is a benign jellyfish.

I float inhaling water that tastes

of iodine and thin bright blood.

2.

We squat on a sandbar digging as the tide

turns and runs to bury the crosshatched scales,

the ribs of the bottom as if the ebbing

of waters exposed that the world is really

a giant flounder. As we wade landward

the inrushing tide is so cold

my ankles ring like glass bells.

We lie belly up baking as the ocean

ambles toward us nibbling the sand.

Out to sea a fog bank stands like world’s

end, the sharp place where boats fall off.

3.

When a storm halts, people get into their

cars. They don’t start picking up yet, the bough

that crashed on the terrace, the window

shattered. No, they rush with foot hard down

on the accelerator over the wet winding black

topped roads where the pine and oak start out

normal size and get smaller till they are

forests for mice. Cars line up on the bluff

facing waves standing tall as King Kong,

skyscrapers smashed before a giant wrecking ball.

Mad water avalanches. You can’t hear.

Your hair fills with wet sand. Your windshield

is being sandblasted and will blind you as the sun

burns a hole in the mist like a cigarette

through a tablecloth and sets fire to the air.

4.

A dream, two hundred times the same. The shore

can be red rocks, black or grey, sand dunes

or barrier reef. The sun blazes. The sky

roars a hard blue, blue as policemen.

The water is kicking. The waves leap

at the shore like flames out of control.

The sea gnashes snow capped mountains

that hurl themselves end over end, blocking

the sky. A tidal wave eats the land. Rearing

and galloping, tumbling and with tangled

mane the horses of the surf with mad eyes,

with snorting nostrils and rattling hooves

stampede at the land. I am in danger

yet I do not run. I am rooted watching

knowing that what I watch

is also me.

Making makes guilt. Cold fierce mother

who gouges deep into this pamet, who

rests her dragon’s belly on the first rocks,

older than land, older than memory,

older than life, my power is so little

it makes me laugh how in my dreaming

lemur’s mind making poems or tales or revolution is this storm on a clear day.

Of course danger and power mingle in all

birthing. We die by what we live by.

Again and again that dream comes when I set

off journeying to the back of my mind,

the bottom of the library, a joust with

what is: the sun a fiery spider high

overhead, the colors bright and clear as glass,

the sea raging at the coast, always about

to overrun it, as in the eye of a hurricane

when the waves roll cascading in undiminished

but for a moment and in that place the air

is still, the moment of clarity out

of time at the center of an act.

     Cutting the grapes free

MUIN

In spring the vine looks like a crucified

witch tied hard to high wires strung

from weathered posts. Those shaggy tormented

limbs shall never flow with sap,

dry as bones the ants have polished,

inert, resistant as obsidian.

Then from the first velvet buds tearing

open the wands stretch bouquets of skinny