ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
Poetry
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Robert Hershon,
Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Novels
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
Other
Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir
So You Want to Write: How to
Master the Craft of Writing
Fiction and the Personal
Narrative (with Ira Wood)
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt:
Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s
Poetry Now: An Anthology
The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of
Days (with paintings by Nell Blaine)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Brush and ink drawing of cat from “Studies of Flowers and Animals” by Shen Chou, 1494, Ming Dynasty. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, the Republic of China.
Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Marge Piercy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and, simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals, where most of these poems previously appeared:
The Ark, Aspect, Blue Buildings, Cedar Rock, Chrysalis, Croton Review, Gallimaufry, The Guardian, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Hard Pressed, Hudson River Anthology, Lady Unique, The Little Magazine, The Lunar Calendar, Mississippi Mud, Moon Dance, Mosaic, Mother Jones, National Forum, Open Places, Paintbrush, Painted Bridge Quarterly, Poetry Now, Poets On, Pulp, Pushcart Press, Real Paper, Shankpainter, Sister Courage, Sojourner, The Spirit That Moves Us, Tendril, The Thirteenth Moon, Transatlantic Review, waves, Woman Poet.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Piercy, Marge. The moon is always female. I. Title.
PS3566.I4M6 811′.5′4 79-21866
eISBN: 978-0-307-76134-7
v3.1
For Woody
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
HAND GAMES
The inside chance
When a friend dies
Night flight
Arriving
Excursions, incursions
Dirty poem
Leonard Avenue
Limited but fertile possibilities are offered by this
brochure
Intruding
The damn cast
The wrong anger
The cast off
Waiting outside
Will we work together?
In memoriam Walter and Lillian Lowenfels
Under red Aries
The ordinary gauntlet
The long death
A battle of wills disguised
Intimacy
To have without holding
My mother’s novel
The low road
What it costs
Season of hard wind
Hand games
The doughty oaks
Armed combat in a café
Poetry festival lover
Complaint of the exhausted author
For strong women
Apologies
The fisherman’s catalogue
Rainy 4th
Neurotic in July
Attack of the squash people
The inquisition
Arofa
Cho-Cho
Cats like angels
A new constellation
Indian pipe
September afternoon at four o’clock
Morning athletes
The purge
Argiope
From the tool and die shop
For the young who want to
Memo
THE LUNAR CYCLE
The moon is always female
SAILLE: Right to life
UATH: May apple
DUIR: Shadows of the burning
TINNE: The sabbath of mutual respect
COLL: Tumbling and with tangled mane
MUIN: Cutting the grapes free
GORT: The perpetual migration
NGETAL: The great horned owl
RUIS: The longest night
BETH: At the well
LUIS: White on black
NION: Another country
FEARN: Crescent moon like a canoe
O!
HAND GAMES
The inside chance
Dance like a jackrabbit
in the dunegrass, dance
not for release, no
the ice holds hard but
for the promise. Yesterday
the chickadees sang fever,
fever, the mating song.
You can still cross ponds
leaving tracks in the snow
over the sleeping fish
but in the marsh the red
maples look red
again, their buds swelling.
Just one week ago a blizzard
roared for two days.
Ice weeps in the road.
Yet spring hides
in the snow. On the south
wall of the house
the first sharp crown
of crocus sticks out.
Spring lurks inside the hard
casing, and the bud
begins to crack. What seems
dead pares its hunger
sharp and stirs groaning.
If we have not stopped
wanting in the long dark,
we will grasp our desires
soon by the nape.
Inside the fallen brown
apple the seed is alive.
Freeze and thaw, freeze
and thaw, the sap leaps
in the maple under the bark
and although they have
pronounced us dead, we
rise again invisibly,
we rise and the sun sings
in us sweet and smoky
as the blood of the maple
that will open its leaves
like thousands of waving hands.
When a friend dies
When a friend dies
the salmon run no fatter.
The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.
Nothing is won by endurance
but endurance.
A hunger sucks at the mind
for gone color after the last bronze
chrysanthemum is withered by frost.
A hunger drains the day,
a homely sore gap
after a tooth is pulled,
a red giant gone nova,
an empty place in the sky
sliding down the arch
after Orion in night as wide
as a sleepless staring eye.
When pain and fatigue wrestle
fatigue wins. The eye shuts.
Then the pain rises again at dawn.
At first you can stare at it.
Then it blinds you.
Night flight
Vol de nuit: It’s that French
phrase comes to me out of a dead
era, a closet where the bones of pets
and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams
of a twenty-year-old are salty water
and the residual stickiness of berry jam
but they have the power to paralyze
Memory’s a minefield.
Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French
former husband. Every love has its
season, its cultural artifacts, shreds
of popular song like a billboard
peeling in strips to the faces behind,
endearments and scents, patchouli,
musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked
herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal
outing, vol de nuit.
Alone in a row on the half empty late
plane I sit by the window holding myself.
As the engines roar and the plane quivers
and then bursts forward I am tensed
and tuned for the high arc of flight
between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold
distant fires of the clustered stars. Below
the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,
ordered, radial, pulsing.
Sometimes hurtling down a highway through
the narrow cone of headlights I feel
moments of exaltation, but my night
vision is poor. I pretend at control
as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge
I am not really managing. I am in the hands
of strangers and of luck. By flight he meant
flying and I mean being flown, totally
beyond volition, willfully.
We fall in love with strangers whose faces
radiate a familiar power that reminds us
of something lost before we had it.
The braille of the studious fingers instructs
exactly what we have succumbed to, far too late
to close, to retract the self that has extruded
from us naked, vulnerable and sticky,
the foot, the tentative eyestalked head
of the mating snail.
To fall in love so late is dangerous. Below,
lights are winking out. Cars crawl into driveways
and fade into the snow. Planes make me think
of dying suddenly, and loving of dying
slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed
trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing
my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide
as I land. Love is plunging into darkness toward
a place that may exist.
Arriving
People often labor to attain
what turns out to be entrance
to a small closet
or a deep pit
or sorrow like a toothache of the brain.
I wanted you. I fought you
for yourself, I wrestled
to open you, I hung on.
I sat on my love as on the lid
of a chest holding a hungry bear.
You were what I wanted: you
still are. Now my wanting
feeds on success and grows,
a cowbird chick in a warbler’s
nest, bigger by the hour, bolder
and louder, screeching and gaping
for more, flapping bald wings.
I am ungainly in love as a house
dancing. I am a factory chimney
that has learned to play Bach
like a carillon. I belch rusty
smoke and flames and strange music.
I am a locomotive that wants
to fly to the moon.
I should wear black
on black like a Greek village woman,
making signs against the evil eye
and powder my head white. Though I try
to hide it I burn with joy like a bonfire
on a mountain, and tomorrow
and the next day make me shudder
equally with hope and fear.
Excursions, incursions
1.
“Learning to manage the process
of technological innovation
more productively” is the theme
of the speech the man beside me
on the plane to Washington
will be saying to a Congressional
subcommittee. He works at M.I.T.
He drinks a martini, glancing sideways.
His watch flashes numbers; it houses
a tiny computer. He observes
me in snatches, data to analyze:
the two-piece V-neck dress
from New York, the manuscript
I am cutting, the wild black
hair, the dirt under my stubby nails.
It doesn’t scan. I pretend
I do not see him looking
while I try to read his speech,
pretending not to: a neutron
bomb of deadly language that kills
all warm-blooded creatures
but leaves the system standing.
He rates my face and body attractive
disturbing. Chop, chop, I want
to say, sure, we are enemies.
Watch out. I try to decide
if I can learn anything useful
to my side if I let him
engage me in a game of
conversation.
2.
At the big round table in the university
club, the faculty are chatting
about wives, marriages, divorces, visiting
arrangements. They all belong
to the same kinship system. They have
one partner at a time, then terminate.
Monogamy means that the husband has
sex only a couple of times with each
other female, I figure out, and
the wife, only with him. Afterwards
the children spend summers/weekends/
Sundays with the father.
Listening becomes eavesdropping and they
begin to feel my silence like a horse
in the diningroom. Gradually as I sit
my hair mats. Feathers stick up from
it, crow and eagle. My cheeks break
out into painted zigzag designs. My spear
leans against the back of my chair.
They begin to question me, oh, um,
do you live communally? What do
you mean, “open”? Hair breaks through
the back of my hands. My fangs
drum on the table top. In another moment
I will swing by my long prehensile
tail from the crystal chandelier,
shitting in the soup.
3.
The men are laughing as I approach
and then they price me: that calculating
scan. Everything turns into hornets
buzzing, swarming. One will
tell me about his wife
weeping tears of pure beersuds;
one is even now swaggering down
the Tombstone set of his mind, the fastest
gun; one will let me know in the next
half hour he thinks political writers
are opportunistic simpletons, and women
have minds of goat fudge; one will
only try unceasingly to bed me as if
I were the week’s prize, and he wears
a chain of fellowships and grants
like sharpshooters’ medals. Mostly they
will chase the students and drink, mostly
they will gossip and put each other
down, mostly they will complain. I
am here for the women, a political
task. They think they have a label
for that. I am on vacation from sex
and love, from the fatty broth
of my life. I am seeking to be useful,
the good godmother. We are acting
in different fables. I know the plots
of theirs, but none of them recognize
mine, except the students, who understand
at once they will be allowed
to chew me to the bones.
4.
I am sitting on a kitchen chair.
My feet do not reach the floor.
If I sit forward, they’ll rest on
a rung, but if I do that, the women
will stop talking and look at me
and I’ll be made to go outside
and “play” in this taffeta dress.
What they say is not what they
are talking about, which lumps
just underneath. If I listen, if I
screw up my face and hold my breath
and listen, I’ll see it, the moving
bump under the rug, that snake in the
tablecloth jungle, the bulge
in women’s dresses you aren’t supposed
to notice. I listen and listen
but it doesn’t go anyplace,
nobody comes out all
right in the end. I get bored
and kick the table leg and am sent
outside to sulk, still not knowing
why everybody said Uncle looked
like he was asleep when he had
lipstick on, in the funny box.
I never got there, into the hot
wet heart of the kitchen gossip,
to sit twisting the ring on my finger
worn smooth, saying my hubby, my old
man, him. I never grew up, Mama,
I grew off, I grew outside. I grew
like crazy. I am the calico
mouse gnawing at the foundations.
The sweet snake is my friend who chews
on the roots of the hangman’s tree
to bring it down. I am the lump