Moon Is Always Female Read Online Free PDF

friends: they too
    have gardens and full trunks.
    Look for newcomers: befriend
    them in the post office, unload
    on them and run. Stop tourists
    in the street. Take truckloads
    to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
    Beg on the highway: please
    take my zucchini, I have a crippled
    mother at home with heartburn.
    Sneak out before dawn to drop
    them in other people’s gardens,
    in baby buggies at churchdoors.
    Shot, smuggling zucchini into
    mailboxes, a federal offense.
    With a suave reptilian glitter
    you bask among your raspy
    fronds sudden and huge as
    alligators. You give and give
    too much, like summer days
    limp with heat, thunderstorms
    bursting their bags on our heads,
    as we salt and freeze and pickle
    for the too little to come.

     The inquisition
    Did you love him? you stab the old
    photographs. And him? And him? And her?
    Oh, you shrug then. What does it mean?
    Your love comes round regularly as the truck
    that sweeps the streets, welcome but
    hardly monumental. It stirs up the dust,
    it goes on its way, doing some kind
    of temporary good, busy, truculent.
    You were only eight years old then, I say,
    how could I love you if I’d been mean
    and proper, if I’d rationed myself
    like some prescription drug, if I’d frozen
    on grit at the core waiting for the perfect
    sun to melt me. I’m a survivor, a scavenger
    and I make the best I can out of the daily
    disaster, I mold my icons out of newspaper mâché.
    How could you make love to him in an elevator
    you say. But it was a freight elevator
    I say, it went up very slowly, you could lock
    it between floors. Besides that was a decade
    ago, I was more adventurist then. Oh, you say,
    so you wouldn’t fuck me in an elevator, I see.
    I like my comfort better now, I say, but you
    are my only comfort. Have you an elevator in mind?
    Look at this book, you say, you wrote him
    twenty-two love poems. How could you? And publish
    them. They weren’t all to him, I say, I was busy
    that year. And they’re good, aren’t they? Still?
    Oh, so it’s just literature, the ones you write
    me. Words. But I write the truth out of my life
    and if some truths are truer than others in
    the long run, the short sprint makes poems too.
    Listen, you idiot, we’re crawling up the far
    slope of our third year and still sometimes
    I weep after we make love. It is love we make
    and it feeds me daily like a good cow.
    I’m an old tart and you come late and I have
    loyalties scattered over the landscape like lots
    I bought and pay taxes on still, but it’s you
    and Robert I live with, live in, live by.
    Because we work together we are obscurely
    joined deep in the soil, deep in the water
    table where the pure vulnerable stream
    flows in the dark sustaining all life. In dreams
    you walk in my head arguing, we gallop
    on thornapple quests, we lie in each other’s
    arms. What a richly colored strong warm coat
    is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.

     Arofa
    My little carry-on baggage,
    my howler monkey, my blue-
    eyed sleek beige passion,
    you want a monogamous relationship
    with me. Othella, if you were
    big as me you’d have nipped
    my head off in a fit.
    Gourmet, winebibber, you fancy
    a good Bordeaux as much
    as schlag, but would rather
    be petted than eat.
    You play Ivan the Terrible
    to guests, you hiss and slap
    at them to go away. Only
    an occasional lover gains
    your tolerance if my smell
    rubs off on him and he
    lets you sleep in the bed.
    When I travel you hurtle
    about upending the rugs.
    When I return you run from me.
    Not till I climb into bed
    are you content and crouch
    between my breasts kneading,
    a calliope of purrs.
    When I got a kitten a decade
    and a half ago, I didn’t know
    I was being acquired
    by such a demanding lover,
    such a passionate, jealous,
    furry, fussy wife.

     Cho-Cho
    At the Animal Disposal League
    you reached through the bars
    avid to live. Discarded offspring
    of Persian splendor and tuxedo
    alley cat, your hunger