Read Online Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy - Free Book Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
Ads: Link
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.
Without you to goad me I would lie
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.
At the well
BETH
Though I’m blind now and age
has gutted me to rubbing bones
knotted up in a leather sack
like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.
It happened near that well by Peniel
where the water runs copper cold
even in drought. Sore and dusty
I was traveling my usual rounds
wary of strangers, for some men
think nothing of setting on any woman
alone, doctoring a bit, setting bones,
herbs and simples I know well,
divining for water with a switch,
selling my charms of odd shaped bones
and stones with fancy names to less
skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,
a husband, or relief from one.
The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.
When I woke up at midnight it had come,
not he, I thought, not she but a presence furious
as a goat about to butt.
Amused as those yellow eyes
sometimes seem just before the hind
legs kick hard.
The angel struck me
and we wrestled all that night.
My dust-stained gristle of a body
clad in proper village black
was pushed against him
and his fiery chest
fell through me like a star.
Raw with bruises, with my muscles
sawing like donkey’s brays,
I thought fighting can be
making love. Then in the grey
placental dawn I saw.
“I know you now, face
on a tree of fire
with eyes of my youngest sweetest
dead, face
I saw in the mirror
right after my first child
was born—before it failed—
when I was beautiful.
Whatever you are, whatever
I’ve won a blessing
from you. Bless me!”
The angel, “Yes, we have met
at doors thrust open to an empty room,
a garden, or a pit.
My gifts have human faces
hieroglyphs that command
you without yielding what they mean.
Cast yourself
and I
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.
Without you to goad me I would lie
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.
At the well
BETH
Though I’m blind now and age
has gutted me to rubbing bones
knotted up in a leather sack
like Old Man Jacob I wrestled an angel.
It happened near that well by Peniel
where the water runs copper cold
even in drought. Sore and dusty
I was traveling my usual rounds
wary of strangers, for some men
think nothing of setting on any woman
alone, doctoring a bit, setting bones,
herbs and simples I know well,
divining for water with a switch,
selling my charms of odd shaped bones
and stones with fancy names to less
skeptical women wanting a lover, a son,
a husband, or relief from one.
The stones were sharp as shinbones under me.
When I woke up at midnight it had come,
not he, I thought, not she but a presence furious
as a goat about to butt.
Amused as those yellow eyes
sometimes seem just before the hind
legs kick hard.
The angel struck me
and we wrestled all that night.
My dust-stained gristle of a body
clad in proper village black
was pushed against him
and his fiery chest
fell through me like a star.
Raw with bruises, with my muscles
sawing like donkey’s brays,
I thought fighting can be
making love. Then in the grey
placental dawn I saw.
“I know you now, face
on a tree of fire
with eyes of my youngest sweetest
dead, face
I saw in the mirror
right after my first child
was born—before it failed—
when I was beautiful.
Whatever you are, whatever
I’ve won a blessing
from you. Bless me!”
The angel, “Yes, we have met
at doors thrust open to an empty room,
a garden, or a pit.
My gifts have human faces
hieroglyphs that command
you without yielding what they mean.
Cast yourself
and I
Similar Books
