The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

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 mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-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 climb out together and walk away.

Snow lies on my fields though the air is so warm I want to roll on my back and wriggle. Sure, the dark downhill weep shows who’s winning, and the thatch of tall grass is sticking out of the banks, but I want to start digging and planting. My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamy soil interlaced with worms red as mouths, my garden, why don’t you hurry up and take your clothes off ?

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 killing 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.

I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.

All day you have been on my mind, a steam iron pressing the convolutions from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating, I told you so, ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back, why aren't you feminine, why aren't you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead? A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise a manhole cover with her head, she is trying to butt her way through a steel wall. Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

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.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating, I told you so, ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back, why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t you soft, why aren’t you quiet, why aren’t you dead?

All day you have been on my mind A seagull perched on an old wharf piling by the steely grip of its claws shrieking when any other comes too near waiting for fish or what the tide brings shaking out its long white wings like laundry. All day you have been on my mind a thrift store glamour hat that doesn't fit with a perky veil scratching my cheek with a feather hanging down like a broken tail.

In my childhood bed we float, your sweet husky voice singing about the crescent moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would climb into like a boat and row away and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.

You who had not been allowed to finish tenth grade but sent to be a frightened chambermaid, carried home every week armloads of books from the library rummaging them late at night, insomniac, riffling the books like boxes of chocolates searching for the candied cherries, the nuts, hunting for the secrets, the formulae, the knowledge those others learned that made them shine and never ache.