Moon Is Always Female (5 page)

and the public is all

he’s hot to screw.

Avoid the poet who tells

his love loudly in public;

in private he counts his money.

     Complaint
     of the exhausted author

Pain turns on its dull red warning light

dim and steady in the dark.

My back clanks like an old coal furnace.

My brain is a cellar bin

empty except for desiccated spiders.

Even the mice have dropped their neat

tracks and shipped out.

Everything I have to burn

is burned and the house grows cold.

I remember real hunger,

the urgency, then the lassitude,

a hollow pain roaring like a distant sea

and through it all the sense

of the body cutting its losses

of the cells shutting down one by one

the lights going out.

That hunger was bone chip sharp.

Not simple, not of the bargaining flesh,

this hunger snivels and whines.

The quaking, tail low but wagging

cur of the heart

has desires that hide and abide,

a lion in yellow dog clothing

who will, who will be fed.

Don’t think because I speak strong words

that I am always strong.

What moves through me moves

on and leaves me empty as a storm sewer

when the rains have gone.

My ribs squeal like a bad accordion.

Feed me, mother me. Coddle my fears.

Or I will go like a mole through the garden

chewing off roots for spite. I will crawl

into the rafters and become a leak

dripping on your chest in bed.

I will turn into a fat rheumatic yellow dog

who sprawls all day on the kitchen floor

in front of the stove in everybody’s way,

and if you make me move

I will fix you with a baleful blind eye

and sigh and limp.

I will turn into a cough you can’t get

rid of, or a fog bank

that broods on the house.

At night I will take my old form

and steal to the typewriter

to write damp querulous poems

like this one.

Feed me before it’s too late.

     For strong women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.

A strong woman is a woman standing

on tiptoe and lifting a barbell

while trying to sing Boris Godunov.

A strong woman is a woman at work

cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,

and while she shovels, she talks about

how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens

the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up

develops the stomach muscles, and

she goes on shoveling with tears

in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t

you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why

aren’t you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined

to do something others are determined

not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom

of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise

a manhole cover with her head, she is trying

to butt her way through a steel wall.

Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole

to be made say, hurry, you’re so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding

inside. A strong woman is a woman making

herself strong every morning while her teeth

loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,

a tooth, midwives used to say, and now

every battle a scar. A strong woman

is a mass of scar tissue that aches

when it rains and wounds that bleed

when you bump them and memories that get up

in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love

like oxygen or she turns blue choking.

A strong woman is a woman who loves

strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly

terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong

in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;

she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf

suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she

enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving

her equally for the strength and for the weakness

from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.

Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.

Only water of connection remains,

flowing through us. Strong is what we make

each other. Until we are all strong together,

a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

     Apologies

Moments

when I care about nothing

except an apple:

red as a maple tree

satin and speckled

tart and winy.

Moments

when body is all:

fast as an elevator

pulsing out waves of darkness

hot as the inner earth

molten and greedy.

Moments

when sky fills my head:

bluer than thought

cleaner than number

with a wind

fresh and sour

cold from the mouth of the sea.

Moments

of sinking my teeth

into now like a hungry fox:

never otherwise

am I so cruel;

never otherwise

so happy.

     The fisherman’s catalogue:
     a found poem

Orvis nymphs: dark hendrickson,

leadwing coachman, pale evening dun.

Cream midge. Grizzly wulff hairwing fly.

Wet flies: hornberg, quill gordon, ginger quill.

Weighted nymphs: zug bug, hare’s ear, Ted’s stone fly.

Caddis pupa of great brown and speckled sedge.

Pale sulphur dun thorax dry fly, Rat Faced McDougal.

King’s river caddis downwing fly.

Silver doctor, green highlander, dusty miller,

black dose, rusty rat, hairy Mary

and the salmon muddler. And the popping frog.

     Rainy 4th

I am someone who boots myself from bed

when the alarm cracks my sleep. Spineless

as raw egg on the tilted slab of day

I ooze toward breakfast to be born.

I stagger to my desk on crutches of strong coffee.

How sensuous then are the mornings we do

not rise. This morning we curl embracing

while rain crawls over the roof like a thousand

scuttling fiddler crabs. Set off a

twenty-one tea kettle salute

for a rainy 4th with the parade and races

cancelled, our picnic chilling disconsolate

in five refrigerators. A sneaky hooray

for the uneven gallop of the drops,

for the steady splash of the drainpipe,

for the rushing of the leaves in green

whooshing wet bellows, for the teeming wind

that blows the house before it in full sail.

We are at sea together in the woods.

The air chill enough for the quilt, warm

and sweet as cocoa and coconut we make

love in the morning when there’s never time.

Now time rains over us liquid and vast.

We talk facing, elastic parentheses.

We dawdle in green mazes of conversing

seeking no way out but only farther into

the undulating hedges, grey statues of nymphs,

satyrs and learned old women, broken busts,

past a fountain and tombstone

in the boxwood of our curious minds

that like the pole beans on the fence

expand perceptibly in the long rain.

     Neurotic in July

Even desks and tables have edges sharp

as the blade of a guillotine today.

The wind gnashes its teeth in the oaks.

The translucent pearl fog of morning

is tarnished with my fear. One friend

dies at home in whatever pitted dignity

pain allows. Another friend lies dying

while the doctors in the hall mumble

their lies unsanctified as white lab rats.

Another comes out of a coma that almost

killed him, mischance exploding in the hands,

while in high glittery summer out on Route 6

tourists try to drive through each other’s

bodies. The rescue squad drags their fatigue

to the third accident today, broken

glass and broken organs, the stench

of spilled gas and blood.

I jerk with anxiety, the reflexes

of a severed tail. Straw and sleet I am.

My thoughts spill, the contents of a dash

board ashtray, butts, roaches, seeds,

cores, bottlecaps. What I dream stinks.

Only in political rage can I scorn danger.

In daily life I quiver like a mass of frog’s

eggs. Quaking I carry my breasts before

me like ripe figs a thumb could bruise

and,
Be careful! Be careful!
I croon

all day like a demented cuckoo with only

one harsh plaintive cry to those I love.

They pay no attention at all but wander

freely in and out of danger like sanderlings

feeding on the edge of the ocean as the tide

changes, chasing after each wave as it recedes,

racing before as the wave rushes back.

     Attack of the squash people

And thus the people every year

in the valley of humid July

did sacrifice themselves

to the long green phallic god

and eat and eat and eat.

They’re coming, they’re on us,

the long striped gourds, the silky

babies, the hairy adolescents,

the lumpy vast adults

like the trunks of green elephants.

Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;

sauté with olive oil and cumin,

tomatoes, onion; frittata;

casserole of lamb; baked

topped by cheese; marinated;

stuffed; stewed; driven

through the heart like a stake.

Get rid of old friends: they too

have gardens and full trunks.

Look for newcomers: befriend

them in the post office, unload

on them and run. Stop tourists

in the street. Take truckloads

to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.

Beg on the highway: please

take my zucchini, I have a crippled

mother at home with heartburn.

Sneak out before dawn to drop

them in other people’s gardens,

in baby buggies at churchdoors.

Shot, smuggling zucchini into

mailboxes, a federal offense.

With a suave reptilian glitter

you bask among your raspy

fronds sudden and huge as

alligators. You give and give

too much, like summer days

limp with heat, thunderstorms

bursting their bags on our heads,

as we salt and freeze and pickle

for the too little to come.

     The inquisition

Did you love him? you stab the old

photographs. And him? And him? And her?

Oh, you shrug then. What does it mean?

Your love comes round regularly as the truck

that sweeps the streets, welcome but

hardly monumental. It stirs up the dust,

it goes on its way, doing some kind

of temporary good, busy, truculent.

You were only eight years old then, I say,

how could I love you if I’d been mean

and proper, if I’d rationed myself

like some prescription drug, if I’d frozen

on grit at the core waiting for the perfect

sun to melt me. I’m a survivor, a scavenger

and I make the best I can out of the daily

disaster, I mold my icons out of newspaper mâché.

How could you make love to him in an elevator

you say. But it was a freight elevator

I say, it went up very slowly, you could lock

it between floors. Besides that was a decade

ago, I was more adventurist then. Oh, you say,

so you wouldn’t fuck me in an elevator, I see.

I like my comfort better now, I say, but you

are my only comfort. Have you an elevator in mind?

Look at this book, you say, you wrote him

twenty-two love poems. How could you? And publish

them. They weren’t all to him, I say, I was busy

that year. And they’re good, aren’t they? Still?

Oh, so it’s just literature, the ones you write

me. Words. But I write the truth out of my life

and if some truths are truer than others in

the long run, the short sprint makes poems too.

Listen, you idiot, we’re crawling up the far

slope of our third year and still sometimes

I weep after we make love. It is love we make

and it feeds me daily like a good cow.

I’m an old tart and you come late and I have

loyalties scattered over the landscape like lots

I bought and pay taxes on still, but it’s you

and Robert I live with, live in, live by.

Because we work together we are obscurely

joined deep in the soil, deep in the water

table where the pure vulnerable stream

flows in the dark sustaining all life. In dreams

you walk in my head arguing, we gallop

on thornapple quests, we lie in each other’s

arms. What a richly colored strong warm coat

is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.

     Arofa

My little carry-on baggage,

my howler monkey, my blue-

eyed sleek beige passion,

you want a monogamous relationship

with me. Othella, if you were

big as me you’d have nipped

my head off in a fit.