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

  we burn the calf, we burn the peach,

  we burn the wine.

  Life is a burning, and what we burn

  is ourselves. Observe the back begin

  to curl, to bow like a paper match

  consumed, and the dark hair powdering

  to grey ashes.

  You are all we cannot live with

  or without. You warm and you spoil,

  you heat and you kill. Like us

  whatever you touch, you seize for your use

  and use up.

  from

  My Mother’s Body

  Putting the good things away

  In the drawer were folded fine

  batiste slips embroidered with scrolls

  and posies, edged with handmade

  lace too good for her to wear.

  Daily she put on schmattehs

  fit only to wash the car

  or the windows, rags

  that had never been pretty

  even when new: somewhere

  such dresses are sold only

  to women without money to waste

  on themselves, on pleasure,

  to women who hate their bodies,

  to women whose lives close on them.

  Such clothes come bleached by tears,

  packed in salt like herring.

  Yet she put the good things away

  for the good day that must surely

  come, when promises would open

  like tulips their satin cups

  for her to drink the sweet

  sacramental wine of fulfillment.

  The story shone in her as through

  tinted glass, how the mother

  gave up and did without

  and was in the end crowned

  with what? scallions? crowned

  queen of the dead place

  in the heart where old dreams

  whistle on bone flutes,

  where run-over pets are forgotten,

  where lost stockings go?

  In the coffin she was beautiful

  not because of the undertaker’s

  garish cosmetics but because

  that face at eighty was still

  her face at eighteen peering

  over the drab long dress

  of poverty, clutching a book.

  Where did you read your dreams, Mother?

  Because her expression softened

  from the pucker of disappointment,

  the grimace of swallowed rage,

  she looked a white-haired girl.

  The anger turned inward, the anger

  turned inward, where

  could it go except to make pain?

  It flowed into me with her milk.

  Her anger annealed me.

  I was dipped into the cauldron

  of boiling rage and rose

  a warrior and a witch

  but still vulnerable

  there where she held me.

  She could always wound me

  for she knew the secret places.

  She could always touch me

  for she knew the pressure

  points of pleasure and pain.

  Our minds were woven together.

  I gave her presents and she hid

  them away, wrapped in plastic.

  Too good, she said, too good.

  I’m saving them. So after her death

  I sort them, the ugly things

  that were sufficient for every

  day and the pretty things for which

  no day of hers was ever good enough.

  They inhabit me

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who choked before they

  could speak their names

  could know their names

  before they had names to know.

  I am owl, the spirit said,

  I swim through the darkness on wide wings.

  I see what is behind me

  as well as what is before.

  In the morning a splash of blood

  on the snow marks where I found

  what I needed. In the mild

  light of day the crows mob

  me, cursing. Are you the daughter

  of my amber clock-tower eyes?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women whose hands were replaced

  by paper flowers, which must be kept

  clean, which could tear on a glance,

  which could not hold even water.

  I am cat. I rub your prejudices

  against the comfortable way they grow.

  I am fastidious, not as a careful

  housewife, but as a careful lover,

  keeping genitals as clean as face.

  I turn up my belly of warm sensuality

  to your fingers, purring my pleasure

  and letting my claws just tip out.

  Are you the daughter of the fierce

  aria of my passion scrawled on the night?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who dreamed that the lover

  would strike like lightning and throw

  them over the saddle and carry them off.

  It was the ambulance that came.

  I am wolf. I call across the miles

  my messages of yearning and hunger,

  and the snow speaks to me constantly

  of food and want and friend and foe.

  The iron air is heavy with ice

  tweaking my nose and the sound

  of the wind is sharp and whetted.

  Commenting, chatting, calling,

  we run through the net of scents

  querying, Are you my daughter?

  I am pregnant with deaths of certain

  women who curled, wound in the skeins

  of dream, who secreted silk

  from spittle and bound themselves

  in swaddling clothes of shrouds.

  I am raccoon. I thrive in woods,

  I thrive in the alleys of your cities.

  With my little hands I open

  whatever you shut away from me.

  On your garbage I grow glossy.

  Among packs of stray dogs I bare

  my teeth, and the warring rats part.

  I flourish like the ailanthus tree;

  in your trashheaps I dig underground

  castles. Are you my daughter?

  I am pregnant with certain deaths

  of women who wander slamming doors

  and sighing as if to be overheard,

  talking to themselves like water left

  running, tears dried to table salt.

  They hide in my hair like crabs,

  they are banging on the nodes of my spine

  as on the door of a tardy elevator.

  They want to ride up to the observation

  platform and peer out my eyes for the view.

  All this wanting creates a black hole

  where ghosts and totems whirl and join

  passing through into antimatter of art,

  the alternate universe in which such certain

  deaths as theirs and mine throb with light.

  Unbuttoning

  The buttons lie jumbled in a tin

  that once held good lapsang souchong

  tea from China, smoky as the smell

  from a woodstove in the country,

  leaves opening to flavor and fate.

  As I turn buttons over, they sound

  like strange money being counted

  toward a purchase as I point

  dumbly in a foreign bazaar,

  coins pittering from my hand.

  Buttons are told with the fingers

  like worry beads as I search

  the trove for something small

  and red to fill the missing

  slot on a blouse placket.

  I carried them from my mother’s

  sewing table, a wise legacy

  not only p
ractical but better

  able than fading snapshots

  to conjure buried seasons.

  Button stamped with an anchor

  means my grade-school peacoat.

  Button in the form of a white

  daisy from a sky blue dress

  she wore, splashed with that flower,

  rouses her face like a rosy dahlia

  bent over me petaled with curls.

  O sunflower hungry for joy

  who turned her face through the years

  bleak, withered, still yearning.

  The tea was a present I brought

  her from New York where she

  had never gone and never would.

  This mauve nub’s from a dress

  once drenched in her blood;

  this, from a coral dress she wore

  the day she taught me that word,

  summer ’41, in Florida:

  “Watch the clipper ships take off

  for Europe. Soon war will come to us.”

  “They will not rise so peacefully

  for years. Over there they’re

  killing us and nobody cares.

  Remember always. Coral is built

  of bodies of the dead piled up.”

  Buttons are useful little monuments.

  They fasten and keep decently

  shut and warm. They also open.

  Rattling in my hand, they’re shells

  left by vanished flesh.

  Out of the rubbish

  Among my mother’s things I found

  a bottle-cap flower: the top

  from a ginger ale

  into which had been glued

  crystalline beads from a necklace

  surrounding a blue bauble.

  It is not unattractive,

  this star-shaped posy

  in the wreath of fluted

  aluminum, but it is not

  as a thing of beauty

  that I carried it off.

  A receeding vista opens

  of working-class making do:

  the dress that becomes

  a blouse that becomes

  a dolldress, potholders,

  rags to wash windows.

  Petunias in the tire.

  Remnants of old rugs

  laid down over the holes

  in rugs that had once

  been new when the rem-

  nants were first old.

  A three-inch birchbark

  canoe labelled Muskegon,

  small wooden shoes, souvenirs

  of Holland, Michigan,

  an ashtray from the Blue Hole

  reputed bottomless.

  Look out the window

  at the sulfur sky.

  The street is grey as

  newspapers. Rats

  waddle up the alley.

  The air is brown.

  If we make curtains

  of the rose bedecked table

  cloth, the stain won’t show

  and it will be cheerful,

  cheerful. Paint it primrose.

  Paint it turquoise, lime.

  How I used to dream

  in Detroit of deep cobalt,

  of ochre reds, of cadmium

  yellow. I dreamed of sea

  and burning sun, of red

  islands and blue volcanos.

  After she washed the floors

  she used to put down newspapers

  to keep them clean. When

  the newspapers had become

  dirty, the floor beneath

  was no longer clean.

  In the window, ceramic

  bunnies sprouted cactus.

  A burro offered fuchsia.

  In the hat, a wandering Jew.

  “That was your grandfather.

  He spoke nine languages.”

  “Don’t you ever want to

  travel?” “I did when I

  was younger. Now, what

  would be the point?

  Who would want to meet me?

  I’d be ashamed.”

  One night alone she sat

  at her kitchen table

  gluing baubles in a cap.

  When she had finished,

  pleased she hid it away

  where no one could see.

  My mother’s body

  The dark socket of the year

  the pit, the cave where the sun lies down

  and threatens never to rise,

  when despair descends softly as the snow

  covering all paths and choking roads:

  then hawkfaced pain seized you

  threw you so you fell with a sharp

  cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.

  My father heard the crash but paid

  no mind, napping after lunch

  yet fifteen hundred miles north

  I heard and dropped a dish.

  Your pain sunk talons in my skull

  and crouched there cawing, heavy

  as a great vessel filled with water,

  oil or blood, till suddenly next day

  the weight lifted and I knew your mind

  had guttered out like the chanukkiyah

  candles that burn so fast, weeping

  veils of wax down the hanukiyah.

  Those candles were laid out,

  friends invited, ingredients bought

  for latkes and apple pancakes,

  that holiday for liberation

  and the winter solstice

  when tops turn like little planets.

  Shall you have all or nothing

  take half or pass by untouched?

  Nothing you got, Shin said the dreidl

  as the room stopped spinning.

  The angel folded you up like laundry

  your body thin as an empty dress.

  Your clothes were curtains

  hanging on the window of what had

  been your flesh and now was glass.

  Outside in Florida shopping plazas

  loudspeakers blared Christmas carols

  and palm trees were decked with blinking

  lights. Except by the tourist

  hotels, the beaches were empty.

  Pelicans with pregnant pouches

  flapped overhead like pterodactyls.

  In my mind I felt you die

  First the pain lifted and then

  you flickered and went out.

  2.

  I walk through the rooms of memory.

  Sometimes everything is shrouded in dropcloths,

  every chair ghostly and muted.

  Other times memory lights up from within

  bustling scenes acted just the other side

  of a scrim through which surely I could reach

  my fingers tearing at the flimsy curtain

  of time which is and isn’t and will be

  the stuff of which we’re made and unmade.

  In sleep the other night I met you, seventeen

  your first nasty marriage just annulled,

  thin from your abortion, clutching a book

  against your cheek and trying to look

  older, trying to look middle class,

  trying for a job at Wanamaker’s

  dressing for parties in cast off

  stage costumes of your sisters. Your eyes

  were hazy with dreams. You did not

  notice me waving as you wandered

  past and I saw your slip was showing.

  You stood still while I fixed your clothes,

  as if I were your mother. Remember me

  combing your springy black hair, ringlets

  that seemed metallic, glittering;

  remember me dressing you, my seventy-year-

  old mother who was my last dollbaby,

  giving you too late what your youth had wanted.

  3.

  What is this mask of skin we wear,

  what is this dress of flesh,

  this coat of few colors and little ha
ir?

  This voluptuous seething heap of desires

  and fears squeaking, mice turned up

  in a steaming haystack with their babies?

  This coat has been handed down, an heirloom:

  this coat of black hair and ample flesh,

  this coat of pale slightly ruddy skin.

  This set of hips and thighs, these buttocks

  they provided cushioning for my grandmother

  Hannah, for my mother Bert and for me

  those major muscles by which we walk

  and walk and walk over the hard earth

  in search of peace and plenty.

  My mother is my mirror and I am hers.

  What do we see? Our face grown young again,

  our breasts grown firm, legs lean and elegant.

  Our arms quivering with fat, eyes

  set in the bark of wrinkles, hands puffy,

  belly seamed with childbearing,

  Give me your dress that I might try it on.

  Oh it will not fit you mother, you are too fat.

  I will not fit you mother.

  I will not be the bride you can dress,

  the obedient dutiful daughter you would chew,

  a dog’s leather bone to sharpen your teeth.

  You strike me sometimes just to hear the sound.

  Loneliness turns your fingers into hooks

  barbed and drawing blood with their caress.

  My twin, my sister, my lost love,

  I carry you in me like an embryo

  as once you carried me.

  4.

  What is it we turn from, what is it we fear?

  Did I truly think you could put me back inside?

  Did I think I would fall into you as into a molten

  furnace and be recast, that I would become you?