Moon Is Always Female (3 page)

     The wrong anger

Infighting, gut battles we all

wage so well. Carnage in the fish tank.

Alligators wrestling in bed.

Nuclear attack

across the breakfast table.

Duels in the women’s center.

The fractioning faction fight.

Where does the bank president

drink his martinis? Where

do those who squeeze the juice

from the land till it blows

red dust in your eye

hang out on Saturday night?

It’s easy to kick my dog,

my child, my lover, the woman

across the desk. People

burning their lives away

for pennies pile up in neighborhoods

like rusting car bodies.

Why not stroll down to the corner

yacht club and invite the chairman

of the board of I.T. & T.

to settle it with his fists?

How hard to war against those

too powerful to show us faces

of billboard lions smiling

from bloodflecked jaws. Their eyes

flick over us like letters

written too small to read,

streets seen from seven miles

up as they spread the peacock

tail of executive jets

across skies yellow with greed.

Their ashes rain down

on our scarred arms, the fall

out from explosions

they order by memo.

     The cast off

This is a day to celebrate can-

openers, those lantern-jawed long-tailed

humping tools that cut through what keeps

us from what we need: a can of beans

trapped in its armor taunts the nails

and teeth of a hungry woman.

Today let us hear hurrahs for zippers,

those small shark teeth that part

politely to let us at what we want;

the tape on packages that unlock

us birthday presents; envelopes

we slit to thaw the frozen

words on the tundra of paper.

Today let us praise the small

rebirths, the emerging groundhog

from the sodden burrow; the nut

picked from the broken fortress of walnut

shell, itself pried from the oily fruit

shaken from the high turreted

city of the tree.

Today let us honor the safe whose door

hangs ajar; the champagne bottle

with its cork bounced off the ceiling

and into the soup tureen; the Victorian lady

in love who has removed her hood, her cloak,

her laced boots, her stockings, her overdress,

her underdress, her wool petticoat, her linen

petticoats, her silk petticoats, her whalebone

corset, her bustle, her chemise, her drawers, and

who still wants to! Today let us praise the cast

that finally opens, slit neatly in two

like a dinosaur egg, and out at last

comes somewhat hairier, powdered in dead skin

but still beautiful, the lost for months

body of my love.

     Waiting outside

All day you have been on my mind,

a seagull perched on an old wharf

piling by the steely grip of its claws,

shrieking when any other comes too near,

waiting for fish or what the tide brings,

shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

All day you have been on my mind,

a thrift store glamour hat that doesn’t fit

with a perky veil scratching my cheek,

with a feather hanging down like a broken

tail tickling my neck, settling its

big dome over my ears muffling sounds.

All day you have been on my mind,

a beauty shop hair dryer blowing sirocco,

wind off the Sahara bearing bad

news and sand that stifles, roaring

through my head thrust in the lion’s hot mouth,

a helmet that clamps me here to bake.

All day you have been on my mind,

a steam iron pressing the convolutions

from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying

cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable

with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow

furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

     Will we work together?

You wake in the early grey

morning in bed alone and curse

me, that I am only

sometimes there. But when

I am with you, I light

up the corners, I am bright

as a fireplace roaring

with love, every bone in my back

and my fingers is singing

like a tea kettle on the boil.

My heart wags me, a big dog

with a bigger tail. I am

a new coin printed with

your face. My body wears

sore before I can express

on yours the smallest part

of what moves me. Words

shred and splinter.

I want to make with you

some bold new thing

to stand in the marketplace,

the statue of a goddess

laughing, armed and wearing

flowers and feathers. Like sheep

of whose hair is made

blankets and coats, I want

to force from this fierce sturdy

rampant love some useful thing.

     In memoriam
     Walter and Lillian Lowenfels

Born into history:

going headfirst through a trapdoor

from heaven into a river

of boiling sewage: what we do

rushes on with cans and bottles.

The good die still ringing

to the nails with hope like a fever.

A friend said of another old man, his war

is over. She could not understand

why he is toted about like a talking

head to demonstrations, press

conferences, unpacked, propped up.

I said, his war is mine.

He wants to be useful as long as he

can want. He needs freedom to blow

through him seeking its hard way.

Struggle wears the bones thin

as it sings in them, but there is no pension,

no retirement fund for the guerrilla.

Alice Paul, old suffragette ailing

on a poverty ward, commands loyalty

I can’t deliver my aunt. The French

feminists who use de Beauvoir’s apartment

for abortions, are her children. Her best love

runs flickering in their veins

altering the faces carved on their genes.

Walter, Lillian, you were my parents too.

Poet, communist, anthologist, writer of letters

of protest to
The New York Times
, jailbird

in the ice age fifties for your politics,

you crowed with life, Walter, in a rustle

of misfiled Thermofaxed work of poets

fifty years younger, Black, Native American,

Quebecois, voices that swarmed in your windows,

a flight of varicolored warblers escaped singing

from the prisons of the world. You grew old

in your craft but never respectable.

A fresh anger for a new outrage quickened you.

You did not think Jara in the stadium in Chile

as they crushed the fingers then the hands

before they killed him to silence, hurt less

than your friends shot in Spain in ’38.

You poured out neat history for aperitifs

to whet the hunger for dinner to come.

You heard new voices each morning and fell

in love catching enthusiasm like a viral fever.

You roared your old loves, preening, showing

off for Lillian and sister Nan, hacking up

a roasted chicken with a cleaver so the drumsticks

flew while the women pretended terror.

I miss you, old man. You never gave up.

Your death caught you still soldiering

in the war I too will never see finished.

Goodbye, Walter and Lillian, becoming history.

     Under red Aries

I am impossible, I know it,

a fan with a clattering blade loose,

a car with no second gear.

I want you to love freely, I want

you to love richly and many

but I want your mouth to taste of me

and I want to walk in your dreams naked.

You are impossible, you know it,

holy March hairiness, my green

eyed monster, my lunatic.

On the turning spit of the full moon

my period starts flooding down and you

toss awake. Sleeping with you then

is spending a night on an airport

runway. Something groaning

from the ends of the earth is always

coming down and something overloaded

is taking off in a wake of ashes.

We are impossible, everybody says it.

I could have babysat in bobbysox

and changed you. Platoons of men

have camped on my life bivouacking

in their war. Now, presumably both adults,

I am still trying to change you.

We are cut from the same cloth, you say,

and what material is that? A crazy quilt

of satin and sackcloth, of sandpaper

and chiffon, of velvet and chickenwire.

I love you from my bones out, impulses

rising far down in the molten core

deep as orgasm in the moist and fiery pit

beyond ego. I love you from the center

of my life pulsating like a storm on the sun

shooting out arms of fire with power

enough to run a world or scorch it.

We are partially meshed in each other

and partially we turn free. We are

hooked into others like a machine

that could actually move forward,

a vehicle of flesh that could bring us

and other loving travelers to a new land.

     The ordinary gauntlet

In May when the first warm days

open like peonies, the coat,

the jacket stay home.

Then making my necessary

way through streets I am impaled

on shish-kabob stares,

slobbering invitations,

smutfires of violence.

The man who blocks my path,

the man who asks my price,

the man who grabs with fat

hands like sweating crabs.

I grimace, I trot.

Put on my ugliest clothes,

layer over sweltering layer.

Sprint scowling and still

they prance in ugly numbers.

I, red meat, cunt

on the hoof, trade

insult for insult,

balance fear on coiled rage.

I pretend to carry easy

on my belt a ray gun.

I flick my finger. A neat

beam licks the air.

The man lights up

in neon and goes out.

My fantasy leaves me still

spread on the meat rack

of their hate.

On the first warm day

let me shoot up twelve

feet tall. Or grow

a hide armored as an

alligator. Then I would

relish the mild air,

I would stroll, my jagged

fangs glinting in

a real broad smile.

     The long death

     
for Wendy Teresa Simon (September 25, 1954–August 7, 1979)

Radiation is like oppression,

the average daily kind of subliminal toothache

you get almost used to, the stench

of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.

We comprehend the disasters of the moment,

the nursing home fire, the river in flood

pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane

crash with fragments of burnt bodies

scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,

the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.

But how to grasp a thing that does not

kill you today or tomorrow

but slowly from the inside in twenty years.

How to feel that a corporate or governmental

choice means we bear twisted genes and our

grandchildren will be stillborn if our

children are very lucky.

Slow death can not be photographed for the six

o’clock news. It’s all statistical,

the gross national product or the prime

lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw

in the right spectrum, how it would shine,

lurid as magenta neon.

If we could smell radiation like seeping

gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we

could hear it as a low ominous roar

of the earth shifting, then we would not sit

and be poisoned while industry spokesmen

talk of acceptable millirems and .02

cancer per population thousand.

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,

murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,

from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,

and fourteen years later statistics are printed

on the rise in leukemia among children.

We never see their faces. They never stand,

those poisoned children together in a courtyard,

and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.

The shipyard workers who built nuclear

submarines, the soldiers who were marched

into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-

bomb, the people who work in power plants,

they die quietly years after in hospital

wards and not on the evening news.

The soft spring rain floats down and the air

is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings

drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,

you run in it and feel clean and strong,

the spring rain blowing from the irradiated

cloud over the power plant.

Radiation is oppression, the daily average

kind, the kind you’re almost used to

and live with as the years abrade you,

high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,

a hacking cough: you take it inside

and it becomes pain and you say, not

They are killing me
, but
I
am sick now
.