Read Online Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy - Free Book Online Page A

will bless your cast
    till your bones are dice
    for the wind to roll.
    I am the demon of beginnings
    for those who leap their thresholds
    and let the doors swing shut.”
    My hair bristling, I stood.
    “Get away from me, old
    enemy. I know the lying
    radiance of that face:
    my friend, my twin, my
    lover I trusted as the fish
    the water, who left me
    carrying his child.
    The man who bought me
    with his strength and beat
    me for his weakness.
    The girl I saved who turned
    and sold her skin
    for an easy bed in a house
    of slaves. The boy fresh
    as a willow sapling
    smashed on the stones of war.”
    “I am the spirit of hinges,
    the fever that lives in dice
    and cards, what is picked
    up and thrown down. I am
    the new that is ancient,
    the hope that hurts,
    what begins in what has ended.
    Mine is the double vision
    that everything is sacred, and trivial,
    the laughter that bubbles in blood,
    and I love the blue beetle
    clicking in the grass as much
    as you. Shall I bless you,
    child and crone?”
    “What has plucked the glossy
    pride of hair from my scalp,
    loosened my teeth in their sockets,
    wrung my breasts dry as gullies,
    rubbed ashes into my sleep
    but chasing you?
    Now I clutch a crust and I hold on.
    Get from me
    wielder of the heart’s mirages.
    I will follow you to no more graves.”
    I spat
    and she gathered her tall shuddering wings
    and scaled the streaks of the dawn
    a hawk on fire soaring
    and I stood there and could hear the water burbling
    and raised my hand
    before my face and groped:
    Why has the sun gone out?
    Why is it dark?

     White on black
LUIS
    They say the year begins in January, but it
    feels like the same old year to me. Things
    give out now, the cabbages rot, the rent
    in the coat sleeve’s too worn to be mended,
    the boot finally admits it leaks, the candle
    nub gutters out with a banner of pungent smoke.
    The cracked dish of the frozen moon lights
    the snow far longer than the old fox of the sun
    that can hardly scale the hill, that crawls
    feebly into the lower branches of the pine
    and drops to earth exhausted.
                                                Little sister
    of the moon you prance on the ice with
    delicate black feet. Your eyes shine red.
    You comb your long tail and plume it out.
    You mate under the porch. With sharp claws
    you dig up the compost and scavenge the dump.
    The air is crystal up to the ice splinters
    of stars but you raise the quickest warm
    nose in the woods, long, sharp as your hunger.
    In the path you wait for me to give way.
    Often you die bloody in the road because
    you expect deference. The wise dog looks
    the other way when you cross his yard.
    The stupid dog never bothers you twice.
    Little sister, mostly when we meet we bow
    rather formally and go our ways, me
    first. I read in a book that perhaps if one
    lifted you by your tail, you could not spray
    or perhaps you could. I envision a man
    in a space suit lumbering over the plain
    of the Herring River to catch and lift
    you in the name of science. Then the space
    suit would be burned perhaps or perhaps
    not. My cats and I sit in the darkened
    livingroom watching through the glass
    as you dance and nibble, your long fur
    sweeping the snow and your nailed feet quick.

     Another country
NION
    When I visited with the porpoises
    I felt awkward, my hairy
    angular body sprouting its skinny
    grasping limbs like long mistakes.
    The child of gravity and want I sank
    in the salt wave clattering with gadgets,
    appendages. Millennia past
    they turned and fled back to the womb.
    There they feel no fatigue but slip
    through the water caressed and buoyed up.
    Never do they sleep but their huge brains
    hold life always turning it like a pebble
    under the tongue, and lacking practice, death
    comes as an astonishment.
    In the wide murmur of the sea they fear
    little. Together they ram the shark.
    Food swims flashing in schools.
    Hunger is only a teasing, endured
    no