Moon Is Always Female Read Online Free PDF Page B

saved
    you, fuzzy and fist-sized.
    Now you are sunny, opaque,
    utterly beyond words, alien
    as the dreams of a pine tree.
    Sometimes when I look at you
    you purr as if stroked.
    Outside you turn your head
    pretending not to see me
    off on business, a rabbit
    in the marshgrass, rendezvous
    in the briars. In the house
    you’re a sponge for love,
    a recirculating fountain.
    Angry, you sulk way under
    a bed till dragged out whining,
    you permit yourself to be
    captured and saved. You blink
    then your goldengreen eyes
    purr and collapse on your back
    with paws up and your snowy
    white belly exposed all curls
    to the plume of your tail.
    Ravish me, you say, with kisses
    and tunafish because I know
    how to accept pleasure. I am
    your happy longhaired
    id, taking the moment as I
    do your finger in my mouth
    without breaking its skin,
    or eviscerating it instantly
    like a mouse.

     Cats like angels
    Cats like angels are supposed to be thin;
    pigs like cherubs are supposed to be fat.
    People are mostly in between, a knob
    of bone sticking out in the knee you might
    like to pad, a dollop of flab hanging
    over the belt. You punish yourself,
    one of those rubber balls kids have
    that come bouncing back off their own
    paddles, rebounding on the same slab.
    You want to be slender and seamless
    as a bolt.
                   When I was a girl
    I loved spiny men with ascetic grimaces
    all elbows and words and cartilage
    ribbed like cast up fog-grey hulls,
    faces to cut the eyes blind
    on the glittering blade, chins
    of Aegean prows bent on piracy.
    Now I look for men whose easy bellies
    show a love for the flesh and the table,
    men who will come in the kitchen
    and sit, who don’t think peeling potatoes
    makes their penis shrink; men with broad
    fingers and purple figgy balls,
    men with rumpled furrows and the slightly
    messed look at ease of beds recently
    well used.
                   We are not all supposed
    to look like undernourished fourteen year
    old boys, no matter what the fashions
    ordain. You are built to pull a cart,
    to lift a heavy load and bear it,
    to haul up the long slope, and so
    am I, peasant bodies, earthy, solid
    shapely dark glazed clay pots that can
    stand on the fire. When we put our
    bellies together we do not clatter
    but bounce on the good upholstery.

     A new constellation
    We go intertwined, him and you
    and me, her and him, you and her,
    each the center of our own circle
    of attraction and compulsion and gravity.
    What a constellation we make: I call it
    the Matrix. I call it the dancing
    family. I call it wheels inside wheels.
    Ezekiel did not know he was seeing
    the pattern for enduring relationship
    in the late twentieth century.
    All the rings shine gold as wedding bands
    but they are the hoops magicians use
    that seem solid and unbroken, yet can slip
    into chains of other rings and out.
    They are strong enough to hang houses on,
    strong enough to serve as cranes, yet
    they are open. We fall through each other,
    we catch each other, we cling, we flip on.
    No one is at the center, but each
    is her own center, no one controls
    the jangling swing and bounce and merry-
    go-round lurching intertangle of this mobile.
    We pass through each other trembling
    and we pass through each other shrieking
    and we pass through each other shimmering.
    The circle is neither unbroken
    nor broken but living, a molecule attracting
    atoms that wants to be a protein,
    complex, mortal, able to sustain life,
    able to reproduce itself inexactly,
    learn and grow.

     Indian pipe
    Fragile drooped heads
    white as rag paper
    raise their funereal grace
    ghostly on blanched needles,
    year old tattered oak leaves.
    The jointed stems suggest
    the bones of marionettes.
    Chill waxen flowers
    blacken as they age
    as if with fire.
    Saprophytic poor relations
    of wintergreen, surely
    they embody decadence.
    Yet decay is necessary
    as the fox’s lunge
    bonded as we are
    electron and proton,
    eater and