Moon Is Always Female, Page 3

  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.

  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 kill
ing

  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 leak
ing

  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