Moon Is Always Female
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