the living by making jokes at corpses.
For we were making sounds from our throats
and lips to warn and encourage the helpless
young long before schools were built
to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.
I wake in a strange slack empty bed
of a motel, shaking like dry leaves
the wind rips loose, and in my head
is bound a girl of twelve whose female
organs all but the numb womb are being
cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,
whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter
of the world girl children are so maimed
and I think of her and I cannot stop.
And I think of her and I cannot stop.
If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.
If you are a man, then at age four or else
at twelve you are seized and held down
and your penis is cut off. You are left
your testicles but they are sewed to your
crotch. When your spouse buys you, you
are torn or cut open so that your precious
semen can be siphoned out, but of course
you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.
For the uses of men we have been butchered
and crippled and shut up and carved open
under the moon that swells and shines
and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant
and then waning toward its little monthly
death. The moon is always female but the sun
is female only in lands where females
are let into the sun to run and climb.
A woman is screaming and I hear her.
A woman is bleeding and I see her
bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts
in a fountain of dark blood of dismal
daily tedious sorrow quite palatable
to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted
that the bread of domesticity be baked
of our flesh, that the hearth be built
of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk,
that we open and lie under and weep.
I want to say over the names of my mothers
like the stones of a path I am climbing
rock by slippery rock into the mists.
Never even at knife point have I wanted
or been willing to be or become a man.
I want only to be myself and free.
I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here
I squat, the whole country with its steel
mills and its coal mines and its prisons
at my back and the continent tilting
up into mountains and torn by shining lakes
all behind me on this scythe of straw,
a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I
wait for the moon to rise red and heavy
in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful
in the dark I wait and I am all the time
climbing slippery rocks in a mist while
far below the waves crash in the sea caves;
I am descending a stairway under the groaning
sea while the black waters buffet me
like rockweed to and fro.
I have swum the upper waters leaping
in dolphin’s skin for joy equally into the necessary
air and the tumult of the powerful wave.
I am entering the chambers I have visited.
I have floated through them sleeping and sleep-
walking and waking, drowning in passion
festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.
I have wandered these chambers in the rock
where the moon freezes the air and all hair
is black or silver. Now I will tell you
what I have learned lying under the moon
naked as women do: now I will tell you
the changes of the high and lower moon.
Out of necessity’s hard stones we suck
what water we can and so we have survived,
women born of women. There is knowing
with the teeth as well as knowing with
the tongue and knowing with the fingertips
as well as knowing with words and with all
the fine flickering hungers of the brain.
Right to life
SAILLE
A woman is not a pear tree
thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity
into the world. Even pear trees bear
heavily one year and rest and grow the next.
An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting
high and wiry gifting the birds forty
feet up among inch long thorns
broken atavistically from the smooth wood.
A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.
You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in
to butcher for chops. You slice
the mountain in two for a road and gouge
the high plains for coal and the waters
run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours
unless you wished to eat them.
Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
foster homes are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.
At this moment at nine o’clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid
any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.
We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.
I will choose what enters me, what becomes
flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.
May apple
UATH
Hawthorn: spines long as my li
ttle finger
that glint in the sun before the leaves come out,
small white flowers like the wild rose
and fruits people don’t eat. Virginity.
Not the hymen it took a week to drill through.
All at sixteen I could concentrate on
was what happened how and would it soon
while my mind turned into chewed bubblegum
and my periods racked me like earthquakes.
No, virginity in the old sense of a woman
unmated and not mating: solitude. A state
I have passed in and out of, the nature
of the dreaming mind nobody courts.
State of my cats when they are neither
in heat nor pregnant but predators, players,
brooding elegant gods. Sitting paws folded
and facing they blink courteously
and contemplate mathematical laws.
Eyes alter us by their observant gaze.
We are never the same after someone
has first loved us. The self the other
sees hangs in the mirror at least part time.
The innocence lost is living for myself,
ignorant as a wild hawthorn how to allure,
the hair and limbs like a bouquet of white
flowers, dark twigs snipped off the tree.
Alone I am clear as clean ice.
I sleep short hours, stop cooking sauces,
and every day like a desert monk I contemplate
death in each apple core and woodash.
Alone I am twelve years old and eighty.
Alone I am sexless as a pine board.
Alone I am invisible to myself as carbon
dioxide. I touch myself often and then less
as my dreams darken into stained glass allegories.
Alone I find old fears preserved like hiking
boots at the bottom of the closet in a box,
my feet having shaped them just perfect to fit
and eight years later I set off in them to climb.
I become nocturnal. My eyes glow in the dark.
The moist rich parts of me contract underground
into tubers. What stands up still is strong
but crotchety, the village witch people come to
with savory troubles, all ears and teeth.
Shadows of the burning
DUIR
Oak burns steady and hot and long
and fires of oak are traditional tonight
but we light a fire of pitch pine
which burns well enough in the salt wind
whistling while ragged flames lick the dark
casting our shadows high as the dunes.
Come into the fire and catch,
come in, come in. Fire that burns
and leaves entire, the silver flame
of the moon, trembling mercury laying
on the waves a highway to the abyss,
the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith
of the year and potency, midsummer’s eve.
Come dance in the fire, come in.
This is the briefest night and just
under the ocean the fires of the sun
roll toward us. Already your skin is dark,
already your wiry curls are tipped with gold
and my black hair begins to redden.
How often I have leapt into that fire,
how often burned like a torch, my hair
streaming sparks, and wakened to weep
ashes. I have said, love is a downer we take,
love is a habit like sucking on death tit cigarettes,
love is a bastard art. Instead of painting
or composing, we compose a beloved.
When you love for a living, I have said,
you’re doomed to early retirement without benefits.
For women have died and worms have eaten them
and just for love. Love of the wrong man or
the right. Death from abortion, from the first
child or the eighteenth, death at the stake
for loving a woman or freedom or the wrong
deity. Death at the open end of a gun
from a jealous man, a vengeful man,
Othello’s fingers, Henry’s ax.
It is romance I loathe, the swooning moon
of June which croons to the tune of every goon.
Venus on the half shell without the reek
of seaweed preferred to Artemis of the rows
of breasts like a sow and the bow
ready in her hand that kills and the herbs
that save in childbirth.
Ah, my name hung once like a can
on an ink stained girl blue as skim milk
lumpy with elbows, spiky with scruples,
who knelt in a tower raised of Shelley’s bones
praying my demon lover asceticism
to grant one icy vision.
I found my body in the arms of lovers
and woke in the flesh alive, astounded
like a corpse sitting up in a judgment
day painting. My own five hound senses
turned on me, chased me, tore me
head from trunk. Thumb and liver
and jaw on the bloody hillside
twanged like frogs in the night I am alive!
A succession of lovers like a committee
of Congress in slow motion put me back
together, a thumb under my ear, the ear
in an armpit, the head sprouting feet.
Kaleidoscope where glass sparks pierced
my eyes, in love’s funhouse I was hung
a mirror of flesh reflecting flaccid ideas
of men scouting their mothers through my womb,
a labyrinth of years in other
people’s thoroughly furnished rooms.
I built myself like a house a poor family
puts up in the country: first the foundation
under a tarred flat roof like a dugout,
then the well in the spring and you get
electricity connected and maybe the next
fall you seal in two rooms and add some
plumbing but all the time you’re living
there constructing your way out of a slum.
Yet for whom is this built if not to be shared
with the quick steps and low voice of love?
I cherish friendship and loving that starts
in liking but the body is the church
where I praise and bless and am blessed.
My strength and my weakness are twins
in the same womb, mirrored dancers under
water, the dark and light side of the moon.
I know how truly my seasons have turned
cold and hot
around that lion-bodied sun.
Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches and the flames.
The sabbath of mutual respect
TINNE
In the natural year come two thanksgiv
ings,
the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall,
two times when we eat and drink and remember our dead
under the golden basin of the moon of plenty.
Abundance, Habondia, food for the winter,
too much now and survival later. After
the plant bears, it dies into seed.
The blowing grasses nourish us, wheat
and corn and rye, millet and rice, oat
and barley and buckwheat, all the serviceable
grasses of the pasture that the cow grazes,
the lamb, the horse, the goat; the grasses
that quicken into meat and milk and cheese,
the humble necessary mute vegetable bees,
the armies of the grasses waving their
golden banners of ripe seed.
The sensual
round fruit that gleams with the sun
stored in its sweetness.
The succulent
ephemera of the summer garden, bloodwarm
tomatoes, tender small squash, crisp
beans, the milky corn, the red peppers
exploding like roman candles in the mouth.
We praise abundance by eating of it,
reveling in choice on a table set with roses
and lilies and phlox, zucchini and lettuce
and eggplant before the long winter
of root crops.
Fertility and choice:
every row dug in spring means weeks
of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings
choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.
The goddess of abundance Habondia is also
the spirit of labor and choice.
In another
life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat
children. In another life, my sister, I too
would love another woman and raise one child
together as if that pushed from both our wombs.
In another life, sister, I too would dwell
solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks
or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.
Praise all our choices. Praise any woman
who chooses, and make safe her choice.
Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,
Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,
Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us