Venus on the half shell without the reek
of seaweed preferred to Artemis of the rows
of breasts like a sow and the bow
ready in her hand that kills and the herbs
that save in childbirth.
Ah, my name hung once like a can
on an ink stained girl blue as skim milk
lumpy with elbows, spiky with scruples,
who knelt in a tower raised of Shelley’s bones
praying my demon lover asceticism
to grant one icy vision.
I found my body in the arms of lovers
and woke in the flesh alive, astounded
like a corpse sitting up in a judgment
day painting. My own five hound senses
turned on me, chased me, tore me
head from trunk. Thumb and liver
and jaw on the bloody hillside
twanged like frogs on the night I am alive!
A succession of lovers like a committee
of Congress in slow motion put me back
together, a thumb under my ear, the ear
in an armpit, the head sprouting feet.
Kaleidoscope where glass sparks pierced
my eyes, in love’s funhouse I was hung
a mirror of flesh reflecting flaccid ideas
of men scouting their mothers through my womb,
a labyrinth of years in other
people’s thoroughly furnished rooms.
I built myself like a house a poor family
puts up in the country: first the foundation
under a tarred flat roof like a dugout,
then the well in the spring and you get
electricity connected and maybe the next
fall you seal in two rooms and add some
plumbing but all the time you’re living
there constructing your way out of a slum.
Yet for whom is this built if not to be shared
with the quick steps and low voice of love?
I cherish friendship and living that starts
in liking but the body is the church
where I praise and bless and am blessed.
My strength and my weakness are twins
in the same womb, mirrored dancers under
water, the dark and light side of the moon.
I know how truly my seasons have turned
cold and hot
around that lion-bodied sun.
Come step into the fire, come in,
come in, dance in the flames of the festival
of the strongest sun at the mountain top
of the year when the wheel starts down.
Dance through me as I through you.
Here in the heart of fire in the caves
of the ancient body we are aligned
with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming
in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams
who drink the tide and the heartwood clock
of the oak and the astronomical clock
in the blood thundering through the great heart
of the albatross. Our cells are burning
each a little furnace powered by the sun
and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.
This night the sun and moon dance
and you and I dance in the fire of which
we are the logs, the matches and the flames.
The sabbath of mutual respect
TINNE
In the natural year come two thanksgivings,
the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall,
two times when we eat and drink and remember our dead
under the golden basin of the moon of plenty.
Abundance, Habondia, food for the winter,
too much now and survival later. After
the plant bears, it dies into seed.
The blowing grasses nourish us, wheat
and corn and rye, millet and rice, oat
and barley and buckwheat, all the serviceable
grasses of the pasture that the cow grazes,
the lamb, the horse, the goat; the grasses
that quicken into meat and cheese and milk,
the humble necessary mute vegetable bees,
the armies of the grasses waving their
golden banners of ripe seed.
The sensual
round fruit that gleams with the sun
stored in its sweetness.
The succulent
ephemera of the summer garden, bloodwarm
tomatoes, tender small squash, crisp
beans, the milky corn, the red peppers
exploding like cherry bombs in the mouth.
We praise abundance by eating of it,
reveling in choice on a table set with roses
and lilies and phlox, zucchini and lettuce
and eggplant before the long winter
of root crops.
Fertility and choice:
every row dug in spring means weeks
of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings
choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.
The goddess of abundance Habondia is also
the spirit of labor and choice.
In another
life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat
children. In another life, my sister, I too
would love another woman and raise one child
together as if that pushed from both our wombs.
In another life, sister, I too would dwell
solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks
or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.
Praise all our choices. Praise any woman
who chooses, and make safe her choice.
Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,
Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,
Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us
All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,
Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,
Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,
Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:
the names flesh out our histories, our choices,
our passions and what we will never embody
but pass by with respect. When I consecrate
my body in the temple of our history,
when I pledge myself to remain empty
and clear for the voices coming through
I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.
Habondia, the real abundance, is the power
to say yes and to say no, to open
and to close, to take or to leave
and not to be taken by force or law
or fear or poverty or hunger.
To bear children or not to bear by choice
is holy. To bear children unwanted
is to be used like a public sewer.
To be sterilized unchosen is to have
your heart cut out. To love women
is holy and holy is the free love of men
and precious to live taking whichever comes
and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.
Praise the lives you did not choose.
They will heal you, tell your story, fight
for you. You eat the bread of their labor.
You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you
after I went under the surgeon’s knife
for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet
an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.
Then my womb learned to open on the full
moon without pain and my pleasure deepened
till my body shuddered like troubled water.
When my friend gave birth I held her in joy
as the child’s head thrust from her vagina
like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.
Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway
open to us was taken by squads
of fighting
women who paid years of trouble and struggle,
who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives
that we might walk through these gates upright.
Doorways are sacred to women for we
are the doorways of life and we must choose
what comes in and what goes out. Freedom
is our real abundance.
The perpetual migration
GORT
How do we know where we are going?
How do we know where we are headed
till we in fact or hope or hunch
arrive? You can only criticize,
the comfortable say, you don’t know
what you want. Ah, but we do.
We have swung in the green verandas
of the jungle trees. We have squatted
on cloud-grey granite hillsides where
every leaf drips. We have crossed
badlands where the sun is sharp as flint.
We have paddled into the tall dark sea
in canoes. We always knew.
Peace, plenty, the gentle wallow
of intimacy, a bit of Saturday night
and not too much Monday morning,
a chance to choose, a change to grow,
the power to say no and yes, pretties
The human brain, wrinkled slug, knows
like a computer, like a violinist, like
a bloodhound, like a frog. We remember
backwards a little and sometimes forwards,
but mostly we think in the ebbing circles
a rock makes on the water.
The salmon hurtling upstream seeks
the taste of the waters of its birth
but the seabird on its four-thousand-mile
trek follows charts mapped on its genes.
The brightness, the angle, the sighting
of the stars shines in the brain luring
till inner constellation matches outer.
The stark black rocks, the island beaches
of waveworn pebbles where it will winter
look right to it. Months after it set
forth it says, home at last, and settles.
Even the pigeon beating its short whistling
wings knows the magnetic tug of arrival.
In my spine a tidal clock tilts and drips
and the moon pulls blood from my womb.
Driven as a migrating falcon, I can be blown
off course yet if I turn back it feels
wrong. Navigating by chart and chance
and passion I will know the shape
of the mountains of freedom, I will know.
The longest night
RUIS
The longest night is long drawn
as a freight blocking a grade crossing
in a prairie town when I am trying
to reach Kansas City to sleep and one
boxcar clatters after the other, after
and after in faded paint proclaiming
as they trundle through the headlights
names of 19th-century fortunes, scandals,
labor wars. Stalled between factory
and cemetery I lean on the cold wheel.
The factory is still, the machines
turned off; the cemetery looks boring
and factual as a parking lot. Too cold
for the dead to stir, tonight even
my own feel fragile as brown bags
carted to the dump. Ash stains the air.
Wheels of the freight clack by. Snow
hisses on the windshield of the rented car.
Always a storm at the winter solstice.
New moon, no moon, old moon dying,
moon that gives no light, stub
of a candle, dark lantern, face
without features, the zone of zero:
I feel the blood starting. Monthly
my womb opens on the full moon but
my body is off its rhythms. I am
jangled and raw. I do not celebrate
this blood seeping as from a wound.
I feel my weakness summoning me
like a bed of soft grey ashes
I might crawl into.
Here in the pit of the year scars overlap
scabs, the craters of the moon, stone
breaking stone. In the rearview mirror
my black hair fades into the night,
my cheeks look skeletal, my dark eyes,
holes a rat might hide in. I sense
death lurking up the road like a feral
dog abroad in the swirling snow.
Defeat, defeat, defeat, tedious
as modern headstones, regular as dentures.
My blood tastes salty as tears and rusty
as an old nail. Yet as I kick the car
over the icy tracks toward nowhere
I want to be, I am grinning. Lady, it’s been
worse before, bad as the moon burning,
bad as the moon’s horn goring my side,
that to give up now is a joke told
by the FBI minding the tap or the binoculars
staking me out on such a bitter night
when the blood slows and begins to freeze.
I grew up among these smoke-pitted houses
choking over the railroad between the factory
shuddering and the cemetery for the urban
poor, and I got out. They say that’s
what you ask for. And how much more
I ask. To get everybody out.
Hecate, lady of the crossroads, vampires
of despair you loose and the twittering
bats of sleepless fear. The three-headed
dog barking in the snow obeys you.
Tonight I honor you, lady of last things.
late in the warm bed of the flesh.
The blood I coughed from my lungs that year
you stood at the foot of my bed was sour,
acrid, the taste of promises broken
and since then I have run twice as fast.
Your teeth are in me, like tiny headstones.
This moon is the void around which the serpent
with its tail in its mouth curls.
Where there is no color, no light,
no sound, what is? The dark of the mind.
In terror begins vision. In silence
I learn my song, here at the stone
nipple, the black moon bleeding,
the egg anonymous as water,
the night that goes on and on,
a tunnel through the earth.
Crescent moon like a canoe
FEARN
This month you carried me late and heavy
in your belly and finally near Tuesday
midnight you gave me light and life, the season
Kore returns to Demeter, and you suffer
and I cannot save you though I burn with dreams.
Memories the color of old blood,
scraps of velvet gowns, lace, chiffon veils,
your sister’s stage costumes (Ziegfeld
didn’t stint) we fingered together, you
padding in sneakers and wash-worn housedresses.
You grew celery by tucking sliced off
bottoms in the soil. You kept a compost
pile in 1940. Your tomatoes glowed
like traffic signals in the table-sized yard.
Don’t kill spiders, you warned.
In an asbestos box in Detroit where sputtering
factories yellow the air, where sheets
on the line turn ashen, you nurtured
a backyard jungle. Every hungry cat
wanted to enter and every child.
You who had not been allowed to finish
tenth grade but sent to be a frightened
chambermaid, carried home every we
ek
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.
You were taught to feel stupid; you
were made to feel dirty; you were
forced to feel helpless; you were trained
to feel lost, uprooted, terrified.
You could not love yourself or me.
Dreamer of fables that hid their own
endings, kitchen witch, reader of palms,
you gave me gifts and took them back
but the real ones boil in the blood
and swell in the breasts, furtive, strong.
You gave me hands that can pick up
a wild bird so that the bird relaxes,
turns and stares. I have handled
fifty stunned and injured birds and killed
only two through clumsiness, with your touch.
You taught me to see the scale on the bird
leg, the old woman’s scalp pink as a rose
under the fluff, the golden flecks in the iris
of your eye, the silver underside of leaves
blown back. I am your poet, mother.
You did not want the daughter you got.
You wanted a girl to flirt as you did
and marry as you had and chew the same
sour coughed up cud, yet you wanted too
to birth a witch, a revenger, a sword
of hearts who would do all the things
you feared. Don’t do it, they’ll kill
you, you’re bad, you said, slapping me down
hard but always you whispered, I could have!
Only rebellion flashes like lightning.
I wanted to take you with me, you don’t
remember. We fought like snakes, biting
hard at each other’s spine to snap free.
You burned my paper armor, rifled my diaries,
snuffed my panties looking for smudge of sex,
so I took off and never came back. You can’t
imagine how I still long to save you,
to carry you off, who can’t trust me
to make coffee, but your life and mine pass