Moon Is Always Female (4 page)

     A battle of wills disguised

You and I, are we in the same story?

Sometimes, never, on Tuesdays and Fridays?

I never ordered this Mama costume.

I don’t want to be Joan Crawford: she dies

in the last reel, relinquishing all.

This is my movie too, you know. Why

is there a woman in it trying to kill me?

I thought this was a love story, but

of how much you and I both love you?

You and I, are we fighting the same war?

Then why do you lie on the telephone,

your voice fuzzy with the lint of guilt?

If the enemy is north, why do the guns

point at my house? Why do you study karate

instead of artillery and guerrilla warfare?

Two generals command the armies of their bodies,

feinting, withdrawing, attacking. If it’s the same

war, are you sure we’re fighting on the same side?

You and I, are we in the same relationship?

Then when you say what a good night we had why

do I writhe awake? Why do you explain how much

better things are getting as you race

out the door, leap the hedge and catch the last

train to the city? After a week you call

from the Coast to say how close you’re feeling.

If this is a detective story I know who did it,

but who are the cops I can call? Just you. Just me.

     Intimacy

Why does my life so often

feel like a slither of entrails

pouring from a wound in my belly?

With both my hands I grasp

my wet guts, trying to force

them back in.

                    Why does my life

so often feel like a wild

black lake under the midnight

thunder where I am drowning,

waves crashing over my face

as I try to breathe.

                            Why

does my life feel like a war

I am fighting alone? Why are

you fighting me? Why aren’t

you with me? If I die this instant

will you be more content

with the morning news?

Will your coffee taste better?

I am not your fate. I am not your government.

I am not your FBI. I am not

even your mother, not your father

or your nightmare or your health.

I am not a fence, not a wall.

I am not the law or the actuarial tables

of your insurance broker. I am

a woman with my guts loose

in my hands, howling and it is not

because I committed hara-kiri.

I suggest either you cook me

or sew me back up. I suggest you walk

into my pain as into the breaking

waves of an ocean of blood, and either

we will both drown or we will

climb out together and walk away.

     To have without holding

Learning to love differently is hard,

love with the hands wide open, love

with the doors banging on their hinges,

the cupboard unlocked, the wind

roaring and whimpering in the rooms

rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

that thwack like rubber bands

in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open

stretching the muscles that feel

as if they are made of wet plaster,

then of blunt knives, then

of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes

of grab, of clutch; to love and let

go again and again. It pesters to remember

the lover who is not in the bed,

to hold back what is owed to the work

that gutters like a candle in a cave

without air, to love consciously,

conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing

me, but you thrive, you glow

on the street like a neon raspberry,

You float and sail, a helium balloon

bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing

on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

as we make and unmake in passionate

diastole and systole the rhythm

of our unbound bonding, to have

and not to hold, to love

with minimized malice, hunger

and anger moment by moment balanced.

     My mother’s novel

Married academic woman ten

years younger holding that microphone

like a bazooka, forgive

me that I do some number of things

that you fantasize but frame

impossible. Understand:

I am my mother’s daughter,

a small woman of large longings.

Energy hurled through her

confined and fierce as in a wind

tunnel. Born to a mean

harried poverty crosshatched

by spidery fears and fitfully

lit by the explosions

of politics, she married her way

at length into the solid workingclass:

a box of house, a car she could

not drive, a TV set kept turned

to the blare of football,

terrifying power tools, used wall

to wall carpeting protected

by scatter rugs.

Out of backyard posies

permitted to fringe

the proud hanky lawn

her imagination hummed

and made honey,

occasionally exploding

in mad queen swarms.

I am her only novel.

The plot is melodramatic,

hot lovers leap out of

thickets, it makes you cry

a lot, in between the revolutionary

heroics and making good

home-cooked soup.

Understand: I am my mother’s

novel daughter: I

have my duty to perform.

     The low road

What can they do

to you? Whatever they want.

They can set you up, they can

bust you, they can break

your fingers, they can

burn your brain with electricity,

blur you with drugs till you

can’t walk, can’t remember, they can

take your child, wall up

your lover. They can do anything

you can’t stop them

from doing. How can you stop

them? Alone, you can fight,

you can refuse, you can

take what revenge you can

but they roll over you.

But two people fighting

back to back can cut through

a mob, a snake-dancing file

can break a cordon, an army

can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other

sane, can give support, conviction,

love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation,

a committee, a wedge. With four

you can play bridge and start

an organization. With six

you can rent a whole house,

eat pie for dinner with no

seconds, and hold a fund raising party.

A dozen make a demonstration.

A hundred fill a hall.

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;

ten thousand, power and your own paper;

a hundred thousand, your own media;

ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,

it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no,

it starts when you say
We

and know who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.

     What it costs

Now it costs to say

I will survive, now when

my words coat my clenched

teeth with blood, now

when I have been yanked

off love like a diver

whose hose is cut.

I push against

the dizzying onslaught

of heavy dark water.

Up or down? While

the heart kicks

like a strangled rabbit

and the lungs buckle

like poor balloons:

I will survive.

I will lift the leaden

coffin lid of the surface

and thrust my face

into the air.

I will feel the sun’s

rough tongue on my face.

Then I’ll start swimming

toward the coast

that must somewhere

blur the horizon

with wheeling birds.

     Season of hard wind

Sometimes we grind elbows clashing

like stripped gears. Our wills bang.

We spark, exposed wires spitting, scorched.

I wring the phone cord in my hands, trying

to suck wine from that cold umbilicus.

Your voice enters my ear like pebbles thrown.

My body parts for you shuddering and you

enter my spine and my dreams. All night

we climb mountains in each other’s skull, arguing.

When I imagine losing you I see a continent

of ice and blasted rock, of glaciers blue

as skim milk, bank vaults of iceberg.

I see a land without soil, where nothing grows

but the slow cliff high thrust of the glaciers

and a meaningless cairn of skulls at the pole.

I would go on, like Scott who trudging alone

saw another plodding beside him as he starved

and froze, his double, his despair, his death.

Lonely, I am not alone, but my mind surrounds

me with demon whispers, skeptical ghosts.

I prefer to quarrel with those I truly love.

     Hand games

Intent gets blocked by noise.

How often what we spoke

in the bathtub, weeping

water to water, what we framed

lying flat in bed to the spiked

night is not the letter that arrives,

the letter we thought we sent. We drive

toward each other on expressways

without exits. The telephone

turns our voices into codes,

then decodes the words falsely,

terms of an equation

that never balances, a scale

forever awry with its foot

stuck up lamely like a scream.

Drinking red wine from a sieve,

trying to catch love in words,

its strong brown river in flood

pours through our weak bones.

A kitten will chase the beam of a flash

light over the floor. We learn

some precious and powerful forces

can not be touched, and what

we touch plump and sweet

as a peach from the tree, a tomato

from the vine, sheds the name

as if we tried to write in pencil

on its warm and fragrant skin.

Mostly the television is on

and the washer is running and the kettle

shrieks it’s boiling while the telephone

rings. Mostly we are worrying about

the fuel bill and how to pay the taxes

and whether the diet is working

when the moment of vulnerability

lights on the nose like a blue moth

and flitters away through clouds of mosquitoes

and the humid night. In the leaking

sieve of our bodies we carry

the blood of our love.

     The doughty oaks

Oaks don’t drop their leaves

as elms and lindens do.

They evolved no corky layer,

no special tricks.

They shut off the water.

Leaves hang on withering

tougher than leather.

Wind tears them loose.

Slowly they grow, white oaks

under the pitch pines,

tap roots plunging

deep, enormous carrots.

By the marsh they turn

twisting, writhing

aging into lichens, contorted

like the wind solidified.

In the spring how stubborn

how cautious

clutching their wallets tight.

Long after the maples,

the beeches have leafed out

they sleep in their ragged leaves.

Reluctantly in the buzz and hum

they raise velvet

antlers flushed red,

then flash silvery tassels.

At last vaulted

green chambers of summer.

Ponderous, when mature, as elephants,

in the storm they slam castle doors.

They all prepare to be great

grandfathers, in the meantime

dealing in cup and saucer acorns.

When frost crispens the morning,

they give up nothing willingly.

Always fighting the season,

conservative, mulish.

I find it easy to admire in trees

what depresses me in people.

     Armed combat in a café

How easy for us to argue

shoving the ugly counters

of jargon across the table,

mah-jong tiles slapping,

the bang of ego on ego

feminist versus Marxist cant.

To feel alienated

is easy, to use words

to hold the self free,

clean from the taffy

of loving, from the wet

sticky hands of need.

We use our politics

as French papas put broken

bottles, jagged glass on top

of the walls of suburban

villas, so no prowler

can climb over.

What closeness remains

is that of samurai

in ritual sword dance

combat, each hoping to

behead the other and,

invulnerable and armored, escape.

     Poetry festival lover

He reads his poem about you,

making sure everyone in town

knows you have been lovers

as if he published his own

tabloid with banner head

and passed it out at the door.

He kneels at your feet as you sit

a stuffed duck at autographings

and holds the hand others

wait to have sign their

purchased books.

Alone the last night he asks

favors (blurbs, readings,

your name on a folder) but

not your favor: he wants

the position but not the work.

His private parts lie quiet