Moon Is Always Female (9 page)

serpents coiling along the wires to bury

them in rampant swelling leaves, a dense

fluttering cascade of heavy green over

the trellis and path, climbing the pine.

Now the grapes swell in the sun yellow

and black and ruby mounds of breast

and testicle, the image of ripe flesh

rounding warm to the fingers. The wasps

and bees drone drunken, our lips, our

tongues stained purple with juice, and sweet.

We bleed when we blossom from the straight

grainy pine of girlhood. We bleed when we taste

first of men. We bleed when we bear and when

we don’t. Vine, from my blood is fermented

poetry and from yours wine that tunes my sinews

and nerves till they sing instead of screeching.

I do not seek immortality, to be a rock

which only dissolves in slow motion,

but to age well like good wine harsh young

but fit to lay down, the best of me

in the dark of libraries and minds to be taken

with care into the light and savored.

I do not seek to leap free from the wheel

of change but to dance in that turning.

What depends more on the seasons

and the years than wine: whether rains come,

the pounding hail, the searing drought,

the lethal hoar kiss of the frost?

In this glass the Mosel pale as straw

shines with the sun of a spent year

and pricks my tongue with tiny bubbles

that were not in it last week. The vines

of its home are blossoming and the wine

remembers its natal soil as I must.

The press of the years bears down

on us till we bleed from every pore

yet in our cells sun is stored in honey

ready to be spilled or to nurture.

Like wine I must finally trust myself

to other tongues or turn to vinegar.

     The perpetual migration

GORT

How do we know where we are going?

How do we know where we are headed

till we in fact or hope or hunch

arrive? You can only criticize,

the comfortable say, you don’t know

what you want. Ah, but we do.

We have swung in the green verandas

of the jungle trees. We have squatted

on cloud-grey granite hillsides where

every leaf drips. We have crossed

badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.

We have paddled into the tall dark sea

in canoes. We always knew.

Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow

of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night

and not too much Monday morning,

a chance to choose, a chance to grow,

the power to say no and yes, pretties

and dignity, an occasional jolt of truth.

The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows

like a computer, like a violinist, like

a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember

backwards a little and sometimes forwards,

but mostly we think in the ebbing circles

a rock makes on the water.

The salmon hurtling upstream seeks

the taste of the waters of its birth

but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile

trek follows charts mapped on its genes.

The brightness, the angle, the sighting

of the stars shines in the brain luring

till inner constellation matches outer.

The stark black rocks, the island beaches

of waveworn pebbles where it will winter

look right to it. Months after it set

forth it says, home at last, and settles.

Even the pigeon beating its short whistling

wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.

In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips

and the moon pulls blood from my womb.

Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown

off course yet if I turn back it feels

wrong. Navigating by chart and chance

and passion I will know the shape

of the mountains of freedom, I will know.

     The great horned owl

NGETAL

I wake after midnight and hear

you hunting: that sound seems to lodge

in the nape like a hollow bullet,

a rhythmic hooting plaintive as if

you seduced your prey by pity.

How you swoop from the dark of the trees

against the blackest blue sky of the November

full moon, your wings spread wide as my

arms, rough heavy sails rigged for a storm.

The moon blinds me as she glides in ripping

skeins of cloud. On your forehead you bear

her crescents, your eyes hypnotic

as her clock-face disc. Gale force winds

strip crispened leaves from the branches

and try the strength of the wood. The weakest

die now, giving back their bodies

for the white sheet of the snow to cover.

Now my cats are not let out after sunset

because you own the night. After two years

you return to my land. I fear and protect

you, come to harry the weak in the long dark.

Pellets of mouse and bird and shrew bone

I will find at the base of the pines.

You have come to claim your nest again

in the old white oak whose heart is thick

with age, and in the dead of the winter

when the snow has wept into ice and frozen

and been buried again in snow and crusted over,

you will give birth before the willow buds

swell and all night you will hunt for those

first babies of the year, downy owlets shivering.

Waking to hear you I touch the warm back

of my lover sleeping beside me on his stomach

like a child.

     The longest night

RUIS

The longest night is long drawn

as a freight blocking a grade crossing

in a prairie town when I am trying

to reach Kansas City to sleep and one

boxcar clatters after the other, after

and after in faded paint proclaiming

as they trundle through the headlights

names of 19th-century fortunes, scandals,

labor wars. Stalled between factory

and cemetery I lean on the cold wheel.

The factory is still, the machines

turned off; the cemetery looks boring

and factual as a parking lot. Too cold

for the dead to stir, tonight even

my own feel fragile as brown bags

carted to the dump. Ash stains the air.

Wheels of the freight clack by. Snow

hisses on the windshield of the rented car.

Always a storm at the winter solstice.

New moon, no moon, old moon dying,

moon that gives no light, stub

of a candle, dark lantern, face

without features, the zone of zero:

I feel the blood starting. Monthly

my womb opens on the full moon but

my body is off its rhythms. I am

jangled and raw. I do not celebrate

this blood seeping as from a wound.

I feel my weakness summoning me

like a bed of soft grey ashes

I might crawl into.

Here in the pit of the year scars overlap

scabs, the craters of the moon, stone

breaking stone. In the rearview mirror

my black hair fades into the night,

my cheeks look skeletal, my dark eyes,

holes a rat might hide in. I sense

death lurking up the road like a feral

dog abroad in the swirling snow.

Defeat, defeat, defeat, tedious

as modern headstones, regular as dentures.

My blood tastes salty as tears and rusty

as an old nail. Yet as I kick the car

over the icy tracks toward nowhere

I want to be, I am grinning. Lady, it’s been

worse before, bad as the moon burning,

bad as the moon’s horn goring my side,

that to give up now is a joke told

by the FBI minding the tap or the binoculars

staking me out on such a bitter night

when the blood slows and begins to freeze.

I grew up among these smoke-pitted houses

choking over the railroad between the factory

shuddering and the cemetery for the urban

poor, and I got out. They say that’s

what you ask for. And how much more

I ask. To get everybody out.

Hecate, lady of the crossroads, vampires

of despair you loose and the twittering

bats of sleepless fear. The three-headed

dog barking in the snow obeys you.

Tonight I honor you, lady of last things.

Without you to goad me I would lie

late in the warm bed of the flesh.

The blood I coughed from my lungs that year

you stood at the foot of my bed was sour,

acrid, the taste of promises broken

and since then I have run twice as fast.

Your teeth are in me, like tiny headstones.

This moon is the void around which the serpent

with its tail in its mouth curls.

Where there is no color, no light,

no sound, what is? The dark of the mind.

In terror begins vision. In silence

I learn my song, here at the stone

nipple, the black moon bleeding,

the egg anonymous as water,

the night that goes on and on,

a tunnel through the earth.

     At the well

BETH

Though I’m blind now and age

has gutted me to rubbing bones

knotted up in a leather sack

like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.

It happened near that well by Peniel

where the water runs copper cold

even in drought. Sore and dusty

I was traveling my usual rounds

wary of strangers, for some men

think nothing of setting on any woman

alone, doctoring a bit, setting bones,

herbs and simples I know well,

divining for water with a switch,

selling my charms of odd shaped bones

and stones with fancy names to less

skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,

a husband, or relief from one.

The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.

When I woke up at midnight it had come,

not he, I thought, not she but a presence furious

as a goat about to butt.

Amused as those yellow eyes

sometimes seem just before the hind

legs kick hard.

The angel struck me

and we wrestled all that night.

My dust-stained gristle of a body

clad in proper village black

was pushed against him

and his fiery chest

fell through me like a star.

Raw with bruises, with my muscles

sawing like donkey’s brays,

I thought fighting can be

making love. Then in the grey

placental dawn I saw.

“I know you now, face

on a tree of fire

with eyes of my youngest sweetest

dead, face

I saw in the mirror

right after my first child

was born—before it failed—

when I was beautiful.

Whatever you are, whatever

I’ve won a blessing

from you. Bless me!”

The angel, “Yes, we have met

at doors thrust open to an empty room,

a garden, or a pit.

My gifts have human faces

hieroglyphs that command

you without yielding what they mean.

Cast yourself

and I will bless your cast

till your bones are dice

for the wind to roll.

I am the demon of beginnings

for those who leap their thresholds

and let the doors swing shut.”

My hair bristling, I stood.

“Get away from me, old

enemy. I know the lying

radiance of that face:

my friend, my twin, my

lover I trusted as the fish

the water, who left me

carrying his child.

The man who bought me

with his strength and beat

me for his weakness.

The girl I saved who turned

and sold her skin

for an easy bed in a house

of slaves. The boy fresh

as a willow sapling

smashed on the stones of war.”

“I am the spirit of hinges,

the fever that lives in dice

and cards, what is picked

up and thrown down. I am

the new that is ancient,

the hope that hurts,

what begins in what has ended.

Mine is the double vision

that everything is sacred, and trivial,

the laughter that bubbles in blood,

and I love the blue beetle

clicking in the grass as much

as you. Shall I bless you,

child and crone?”

“What has plucked the glossy

pride of hair from my scalp,

loosened my teeth in their sockets,

wrung my breasts dry as gullies,

rubbed ashes into my sleep

but chasing you?

Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.

Get from me

wielder of the heart’s mirages.

I will follow you to no more graves.”

I spat

and she gathered her tall shuddering wings

and scaled the streaks of the dawn

a hawk on fire soaring

and I stood there and could hear the water burbling

and raised my hand

before my face and groped:

Why has the sun gone out?

Why is it dark?

     White on black

LUIS

They say the year begins in January, but it

feels like the same old year to me. Things

give out now, the cabbages rot, the rent

in the coat sleeve’s too worn to be mended,

the boot finally admits it leaks, the candle

nub gutters out with a banner of pungent smoke.

The cracked dish of the frozen moon lights