The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010

  fan and the mud colored bubble, among your teeth.

  Attraction to me is a walking toward,

  the doors in the hands and the mind slowly

  swinging on their hinges so that something

  can pass over and something new enter.

  This flicking of the body like a cape before

  a bull, this mincing of the hook under

  the feathers is more war and less love than I need.

  It ain’t heavy, it’s my purse

  We have marsupial instincts, women

  who lug purses as big as garbage igloos,

  women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders:

  we are hiding the helpless greedy naked worms

  of our intentions shivering in chaos.

  In bags the size of Manhattan studio apartments,

  we carry not merely the apparatus of neatness

  and legality, cards, licenses, combs,

  mirrors, spare glasses, lens fluid,

  but hex signs against disaster and loss.

  Antihistamines—if we should sneeze.

  Painkillers—suppose the back goes out.

  On my keyring, flats I used to stay in,

  a Volvo I traded in 1985, two unknown doors

  opening on what I might sometime direly need.

  Ten pens, because the ink may run out.

  Band-Aids, safety pins, rubber bands, glue,

  maps, a notebook in case, addresses of friends

  estranged. So we go hopping lopsided, women

  like kangaroos with huge purses bearing

  our own helplessness and its fancied cures.

  Your father’s fourth heart attack

  The phone cord is the umbilicus

  that binds him dying, shriveled,

  to you his first son.

  You try to draw him to you.

  You give him advice. I hear

  your voice tender, careful,

  admonishing, arguing.

  You ask him ten polite ways

  why he is killing himself

  by the teaspoonful, by the drop,

  by the puff. Why he eats

  ashes instead of apples,

  why he sucks on death’s

  icy dry tit, why he turns

  his face into darkness.

  You cajole him, a step, a step

  like a father coaxing a toddler,

  but he falls through your fingers

  into a maze of knives giving him

  his face back screaming.

  Twelve hours a day he worked,

  four hours commuting, up nights

  in a chair by TV late show light

  wolfing burnt steak and salami on rye,

  counting other men’s paychecks.

  He lived among men with boats,

  sleek men, slick men, always richer.

  He bought a boat from a moneyed neighbor,

  fiberglass hulled, had it repaired,

  started it, roared out and sank.

  No place he lived was ever right,

  but he was always talking up the next

  move. He quarreled with brothers,

  mother, friends, son, in-laws,

  everyone except the bosses he twisted

  and wrung himself to please.

  He was always hungry. If he ate five

  sandwiches, his hunger still knocked

  on his bones like a broken radiator

  and he was never full.

  He lived a hunger bigger than a man,

  a hunger to be other, golden,

  a hollowness finally now filled

  with pain. He holds you in the phone

  but his eyes seek the dark in the mirror.

  He slips in and out of his death bed

  like a suit he keeps trying on, refitting.

  He grabs at a hand and speaks the wrong

  name, and the hand flops cold as a fish

  while he calls till hoarseness, for himself.

  Up and out

  1. THE FOOT GNAWED OFF

  We occupy neighborhoods like roominghouses.

  The Irish lived here; the Italians, then the Jews,

  then the Blacks up from the South and now

  the Vietnamese fill this dirty decaying motel.

  Nobody imagines staying. Success means getting out.

  To be in a place then is only a move in a game;

  who can love a box on a board? Remaining

  is being stuck. My parents amused themselves

  all through my childhood by choosing houses

  from the Sunday paper to visit.

  They could not afford to buy but pretended.

  They wanted to walk through the large rooms

  of their fantasies criticizing the wallpaper,

  counting other people’s chairs, imagining

  waking in that bedroom on that street.

  How can we belong to ourselves, when home

  is something to pry yourself out of

  like a pickup stuck on a sand road;

  when what holds you has to be sacrificed

  as a fox will gnaw off a foot to be free.

  Growing up, what you love most can trap you.

  Friends are for discarding. Lovers

  for saying goodbye. Marriage looks like a closet.

  Even your faithful dog could slow you down.

  Polish your loneliness until its headlight shines.

  Always what formed you, those faces

  that hung like ripe apples in the tree

  of your childhood: the hands that caressed you,

  whose furtive touch untied the knot of pleasure

  and loosened your flesh till it fluttered

  and streamed with joy; those who taught you

  fear at the end of a bright knife; who taught

  you patience as their lips fumbled to force into

  sounds strange squiggles blurring on the page;

  who taught you guile as the hand teases the eye

  into illusion; who gave you the names you really

  use for the parts of your body, for the rush

  of your anger hard into your teeth and fists;

  always what formed you will come trailing guilt

  like a cloud of fine ashes from burnt hair.

  You will always be struck into memory like a match

  spurting and then burn out in silence, because

  there is no one to say, yes, I too remember,

  I know how it was. We litter our past

  on the sides of roads in fast food wrappers.

  2. SOFT COAL COUNTRY

  We used to drive to Ebensburg in the soft coal

  country of Pennsylvania, an old brick Victorian

  on the bottom of High Street where trucks shifted gears

  to start their descent or labored upward all night;

  from the backbone of High the ribs of side streets

  like a fish carcass fell sharply away into gullies.

  Around it were the miners’ towns it served,

  the grim company towns with the made-up names, Revloc,

  Colver; the miners’ shanties clinging to the sides

  of hogback ridges, Nantiglo, Monday’s Corner.

  All the roads were blasted through rock.

  On Horseshoe Curve you could watch the long long

  freights toiling up and shrieking down, miles

  around the crescent. The mountains had an anger

  in them. The stone oozed bright water stained

  with iron. I muttered the names of towns like prayers

  returning with my father because a man must visit

  his family. This was a place he had to leave,

  so afraid of ending up with all grandmother’s Lloyds

  grubbing in the mines that when they shone

  their sweet smiles at weddings, funerals, he’d

  pretend he could not tell cousin from cousin.

  Later when the mines shut and all the first
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  and second cousins were out of work for the fifth

  year running and their families cracking along

  old troubles, where they’d been glued, he said,

  See, you can’t make an honest living here.

  I loved the mountains; he merely conquered them.

  He returned not to see but to be seen, wearing

  his one good suit, driving his nearly new car,

  showing off the sexy black-haired wife not like any

  in his high school yearbook, although they all knew

  to sniff and say, Jew. Always the morning we left

  he was up an hour early, tapping his foot under

  the table, lighting cigarette from half-smoked butt

  and then he would stomp his foot on the accelerator

  and take the mountain roads clocking himself against

  some pursuing maw so that if he did not push the car

  and himself to the edge of danger, he would be back,

  back with his desperate nagging sisters counting pennies

  with a mountain on his chest pinning him down.

  3. WHEN I WAS CADDY

  Cleveland was the promised land of my childhood,

  where my bubba cooked kosher and even her cat had good

  manners and sat at the table, and she told me that

  when they were alone, he used a knife and fork.

  I always hoped he would do it while I was eating.

  I remember the smell of the women when I pressed

  against her side behind the mehitzeh, camphor,

  eucalyptus, cinnamon, lavender, sweat. Aunt Ruth

  was the smartest girl, closer in age to me

  than to my mother. When I was ten she married

  into the middle class and took Bobbah to the suburbs.

  She worked for the Navy. What a pity you don’t

  have a degree, they were always telling her,

  but she did the work without a rating. Driven

  to excel, she began to replace all the bowling

  trophies with golfing trophies. We walked to

  the course through the flat green morning swishing

  with sprinklers, both of us almost tiptoeing. It was

  so clean and neat, the streets like a funeral parlor

  full of gladiolus, we tried to talk softly, properly.

  All grandma’s cronies were back in the ghetto.

  There was no synagogue for miles. No kosher butcher.

  She ate a lot of canned salmon and packaged soup.

  Without neighbors to gossip about important things

  she turned to the soaps and worried about Helen Trent.

  Suddenly my mother was taking phone calls at 1 a.m.

  she was warning, Do you want to lose it all?

  So he hit you. So what else is new to wives?

  Then Bobbah and Ruth were back in the ghetto,

  now partly Black and Bobbah was cooking again.

  The kitchen smelled the way it should and so did she.

  Old ladies were drinking tea in glasses and quoting

  Lenin and their own rabbis. Every strike was fought over.

  Every young woman’s reputation was put through a sieve.

  Every grandchild was taken and properly raised.

  And me, I was back, oh briefly, briefly back

  in the promised land of love and endless stories

  before cancer ate Bobbah, savoring each organ

  but leaving her voice till the end. And Aunt Ruth

  ran till she came to the Pacific and then fell down.

  4. TOWARD A GOOD ROOTING MEDIUM

  The Ogibwa said to me, my people have lived

  on this sea since the mountains moved.

  (The last ice age.) Our heart is here.

  When we move to the cities, we blow into dust.

  There are villages in Cornwall

  continuously occupied for five thousand years.

  Jericho has been a city since 7000 B.C.E.

  I’ve known families who farmed their soil

  and gave their bones to it till it was as known

  to them as the face of a mother or the body

  of one passionately loved; people who have come back

  to the same place year after year and retired on it,

  walking its seasons till they can read the sky

  like a personal letter; fisherman who could taste

  a stream and tell you what the trout were doing.

  This is not a pastoral: once I loved Manhattan so.

  A friend could walk Paris streets on a map, sketching

  the precise light, the houses, the traffic sounds.

  Perhaps we should practice by loving a lilac bush.

  Practice on a brick, an oriole nest, a tire of petunias.

  O home over the expressway under a sky like something

  you step in and scrape off your boot, heaped

  ashtray we are stubbed into with smoldering butts,

  billboards touting cancer under the carbolic rain!

  Will the Lenni Lenape take back New Jersey?

  The fish glow in the dark thrashing in dying

  piles on every chenille bedspread, a light by which

  we can almost read the fine print on the ceiling.

  Love it because you can’t leave it. Love it

  or kill it. What we throw away returns in the blood

  and leaves a chemical stain on the cell walls.

  Huck honey, there’s no territory to light out to.

  That glow is from refineries on the farther shore.

  Take your trash out with you or hunker down.

  This is the Last Chance Saloon and Health Spa.

  In heaven as on earth the dishes must be done.

  The task never completed

  No task is ever completed,

  only abandoned or pressed into use.

  Tinkering can be a form of prayer.

  Twenty-six botched worlds preceded

  Genesis we are told in ancient commentary,

  and ha Shem said not only,

  of this particular attempt

  It is good, but muttered,

  if only it will hold.

  Incomplete, becoming, the world

  was given us to fix, to complete

  and we’ve almost worn it out.

  My house was hastily built,

  on the cheap. Leaks, rotting

  sills, the floor a relief map of Idaho.

  Whenever I get some money, I stove

  up, repair, add on, replace.

  This improvisation permits me to squat

  here on the land that owns me.

  We evolve through mistakes, wrong

  genes, imitation gone wild.

  Each night sleep unravels me into wool,

  then into sheep and wolf. Walls and fire

  pass through me. I birth stones.

  Every dawn I stumble from the roaring

  vat of dreams and make myself up

  remembering and forgetting by halves.

  Every dawn I choose to take a knife

  to the world’s flank or a sewing kit,

  rough improvisation, but a start.

  from

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  What are big girls made of?

  The construction of a woman:

  a woman is not made of flesh

  of bone and sinew

  belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.

  She is manufactured like a sports sedan.

  She is retooled, refitted and redesigned

  every decade.

  Cecile had been seduction itself in college.

  She wriggled through bars like a satin eel,

  her hips promising, her mouth pursed

  in the dark red lipstick of desire.

  She visited in ’68 still wearing skirts

  tight to the knees, dark red lipstick,

  while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt

/>   lipstick pale as apricot milk,

  hair loose as a horse’s mane. Oh dear,

  I thought in my superiority of the moment,

  whatever has happened to poor Cecile.

  She was out of fashion out of the game,

  disqualified, disdained, dis-

  membered from the club of desire.

  Look at pictures in French fashion

  magazines of the 18th century:

  century of the ultimate lady

  fantasy wrought of silk and corseting.

  Paniers bring her hips out three feet

  each way, while the waist is pinched

  and the belly flattened under wood.

  The breasts are stuffed up and out

  offered like apples in a bowl.

  The tiny foot is encased in a slipper

  never meant for walking.

  On top is a grandiose headache:

  hair like a museum piece, daily

  ornamented with ribbons, vases,

  grottoes, mountains, frigates in full

  sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy

  of a hairdresser turned loose.

  The hats were rococo wedding cakes

  that would dim the Las Vegas strip.

  Here is a woman forced into shape

  rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh:

  a woman made of pain.

  How superior we are now:

  see the modern woman

  thin as a blade of scissors.

  She runs on a treadmill every morning,

  fits herself into machines of weights

  and pulleys to heave and grunt,

  an image in her mind she can never

  approximate, a body of rosy

  glass that never wrinkles,

  never grows, never fades. She

  sits at the table closing her eyes to food