Moon Is Always Female
ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
Poetry
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling
(with Robert Hershon
,
Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
Novels
Storm Tide
(with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
Other
Sleeping with Cats, A Memoir
So You Want to Write: How to
Master the Craft of Writing
Fiction and the Personal
Narrative
(with Ira Wood)
The Last White Class: A Play
(with Ira Wood)
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt:
Essays
Early Ripening: American Women’s
Poetry Now: An Anthology
The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of
Days
(with paintings by Nell Blaine)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Brush and ink drawing of cat from “Studies of Flowers and Animals” by Shen Chou, 1494, Ming Dynasty. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, the Republic of China.
Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Marge Piercy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and, simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry/
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals, where most of these poems previously appeared:
The Ark
,
Aspect
,
Blue Buildings
,
Cedar Rock
,
Chrysalis
,
Croton Review
,
Gallimaufry
,
The Guardian
,
Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review
,
Hard Pressed
,
Hudson River Anthology
,
Lady Unique
,
The Little Magazine
,
The Lunar Calendar
,
Mississippi Mud
,
Moon Dance
,
Mosaic
,
Mother Jones
,
National Forum
,
Open Places
,
Paintbrush
,
Painted Bridge Quarterly
,
Poetry Now
,
Poets On
,
Pulp
,
Pushcart Press
,
Real Paper
,
Shankpainter
,
Sister Courage
,
Sojourner
,
The Spirit That Moves Us
,
Tendril
,
The Thirteenth Moon
,
Transatlantic Review
,
waves
,
Woman Poet
.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Piercy, Marge. The moon is always female. I. Title.
PS3566.I4M6 811′.5′4 79-21866
eISBN: 978-0-307-76134-7
v3.1
For Woody
Contents
Limited but fertile possibilities are offered by this
brochure
In memoriam Walter and Lillian Lowenfels
Complaint of the exhausted author
September afternoon at four o’clock
TINNE: The sabbath of mutual respect
COLL: Tumbling and with tangled mane
FEARN: Crescent moon like a canoe
HAND GAMES
The inside chance
Dance like a jackrabbit
in the dunegrass, dance
not for release, no
the ice holds hard but
for the promise. Yesterday
the chickadees sang
fever
,
fever
, the mating song.
You can still cross ponds
leaving tracks in the snow
over the sleeping fish
but in the marsh the red
maples look red
again, their buds swelling.
Just one week ago a blizzard
roared for two days.
Ice weeps in the road.
Yet spring hides
in the snow. On the south
wall of the house
the first sharp crown
of crocus sticks out.
Spring lurks inside the hard
casing, and the bud
begins to crack. What seems
dead pares its hunger
sharp and stirs groaning.
If we have not stopped
wanting in the long dark,
we will grasp our desires
soon by the nape.
Inside the fallen brown
apple the seed is alive.
Freeze and thaw, freeze
and thaw, the sap leaps
in the maple under the bark
and although they have
pronounced us dead, we
rise again invisibly,
we rise and the sun sings
in us sweet and smoky
as the blood of the maple
that will open its leaves
like thousands of waving hands.
When a friend dies
When a friend dies
the salmon run no fatter.
The wheat harvest will feed no more bellies.
Nothing is won by endurance
but endurance.
A hunger sucks at the mind
for gone color after the last bronze
chrysanthemum is withered by frost.
A hunger drains the day,
a homely sore gap
after a tooth is pulled,
a red giant gone nova,
an empty place in the sky
sliding down the arch
after Orion in night as wide
as a sleepless staring eye.
When pain and fatigue wrestle
fatigue wins. The eye shuts.
Then the pain rises again at dawn.
At first you can stare at it.
Then it blinds you.
Night flight
Vol de nuit: It’s that French
phrase comes to me out of a dead
era, a closet where the bones of pets
and dried jellyfish are stored. Dreams
of a twenty-year-old are salty water
and the residual stickiness of berry jam
but they have the power to paralyze
a swimmer out beyond her depth and strength.
Memory’s a minefield.
Saint Exupéry was a favorite of my French
former husband. Every love has its
season, its cultural artifacts, shreds
of popular song like a billboard
peeling in strips to the faces behind,
endearments and scents, patchouli,
musk, cabbage, vanilla, male cat, smoked
herring. Yet I call this cobalt and crystal
outing, vol de nuit.
Alone in a row on the half empty late
plane I sit by the window holding myself.
As the engines roar and the plane quivers
and then bursts forward I am tensed
and tuned for the high arc of flight
between snowfields, frozen lakes and the cold
distant fires of the clustered stars. Below
the lights of cities burn like fallen galaxies,
ordered, radial, pulsing.
Sometimes hurtling down a highway through
the narrow cone of headlights I feel
moments of exaltation, but my night
vision is poor. I pretend at control
as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge
I am not really managing. I am in the hands