The Hunger Moon

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by Marge Piercy


  drugs for malaria, and you poured

  the whole Pacific war into my ears

  till I was raw and blistered.

  Forty years later I could hear your voice,

  I could see the women falling into the sea,

  I could see the rotting bodies on the coral,

  I remember your talking of the smell of battle,

  of shit when bodies break open,

  how blood stinks like spoiled meat.

  You talked about how you had been promoted

  then busted for hitting your sergeant,

  time in stockade, beaten for being

  a Jew, for being short, for having

  a temper like a piñata breaking.

  You were back to divorce Florence,

  your second wife. You brought souvenirs

  of the occupation, silks, a kimono,

  glass animals, little saki cups, photos

  of you with buddies, geishas, captured flags.

  You marched on and on as the medicine burned

  in you. I was the pit into which you shoveled

  memories and then walked off.

  You winked at me and you began to whistle.

  In your mind you began to change the sky,

  the water, the land. The stories turned

  from yellow to blue. The blood turned

  to paint. It smelled like glory.

  It was the Fourth of July all year

  and the war became a recruiting poster

  featuring you.

  Brotherless three: Never good enough

  Suzie was my niece; she was not

  your daughter: you refused her

  the way someone will send back the wrong

  dish in a restaurant.

  The way you turned from the sons

  of your third marriage. In a pique

  you had a vasectomy, saying that no child

  of yours ever did it right.

  Did what? You seemed to have no love

  to spare for them, as you pretended

  your first three wives were one

  dead woman. For twelve years

  we had only an occasional card.

  What is a half brother? Half time?

  Half there? Half brother and half not?

  We had different fathers. Yours, a short

  stocky Jew whom imigration had labeled

  a foot itch product, Courtade. The

  year before your bar mitzvah, our mother

  eloped with my father. Your father

  took out her desertion on you.

  When you were sixteen, my parents

  caught you fucking your girlfriend Isabel,

  forced you to marry. They tried

  that on me at eighteen. I yelled

  I’d take off and she’d never see me again.

  A pit lined with fur and barbed wire;

  roast chicken and plastique, warmth

  and bile, a kiss and a razor in the ribs,

  our family.

  These memories tangle, a fine gold chain

  with invisible barbs. As I pick out knots,

  always there are tighter knots inside.

  My fingers bleed. I remember

  coming to see you in L.A. in ’64.

  I was in civil rights. Black friends

  told me L.A. was bad, stewing, smell of raw

  sewage on smoggy mornings, hope eviscerated.

  You said, We have no Negroes here.

  Each link, a barb. Each set of links,

  a knot I could never pick free.

  My palms are crisscrossed with scars

  as from barbed wire.

  By then you were a college graduate—

  who had not finished high school.

  By then, your father was a Frenchman,

  a French Catholic. By then, you were

  a Marine hero with medals and war stories

  you shared at the VFW. You drank martinis

  instead of boilermakers. You speculated

  in real estate near that huge

  stinking sink the Salton Sea

  where drowned rats wash up by the flooded

  motels and the desert is laid out

  with sidewalks and street signs.

  Once when I read poetry in your city

  you came. Afterward you stared at me.

  Why do you remember those old sad things?

  Why do these people come to hear you?

  That old stuff, who cares?

  Ah, but you cared. You could not look

  me in the eyes. You could not risk

  one real word

  for fear I would like a big bad wolf

  blow your house down

  with my voice of fire.

  Brotherless four: Liars dance

  The myth says, he left three women,

  three children, his family; his best friend

  he left to die alone, so he was lonely

  and unloved to the bitter end.

  We live far more in fractals than in grids.

  His fourth wife was Chicana, a widow

  with four children who had a house

  in a good section of the L.A. hills.

  Of all his wives and girlfriends,

  she alone resembled our mother—

  small, dark, busty, flirtatious

  she smiled easily and lied,

  as well as he did, but not to him.

  She was Spanish, an old colonial

  family; he was French.

  They were passionate to be proper.

  Their house was papered with genealogies,

  an aristocracy of Oz, detailed

  as the papers of a prize schnauzer,

  a past elaborated, documented

  with the zeal of federal marshals

  protecting a star witness.

  Maybe I should simply see it

  as a mating dance, two cranes

  stepping about each other transfixed,

  the ritual of two hot lovers

  in bed pretending to be children

  or Klingons or dogs—extending

  the role for thirty years.

  Like lovebirds in a cage,

  they did not tire of the mirror

  or each other.

  Brotherless five: Truth as a cloud of moths

  In adolescence I tried on others’

  styles, shrugged on a leather coat

  of tough street kid I had thrown off

  to run the college marathon;

  turned existentialist in black

  turtleneck and black jeans;

  played vamp, played Romeo

  and Juliet alternate nights.

  I would copy bits from movies,

  wriggle my hips like this one,

  pout like that. I thrust myself

  into dramas and slithered out.

  I’ve always seen the alternate

  lives, the faces I might have worn

  had I left the party with this man

  or that instead of going alone

  into the night’s soft rumble;

  had I paused when the golden balls

  were thrown before me on the race

  course like Atalanta, instead

  of laughing and running on.

  Variant selves haunt

  the corridors of my brain, people

  my novels, crowd in like ghosts

  drawn to blood when friends

  or strangers tell me secrets

  hand me their troubles,

  sweaters knit of hair and wire.

  Why then have I stalked for years

  round and round the self you

  built of forged documents,

  charm, sweat and subterfuge

  as if I were the sentinel of truth?

  We both wrote ourselves into being.

  Brotherless six: Unconversation

  I buzz irritating and persistent

  darting, biting at your death.

  What do I hope to understand
?

  Why I grieve for someone I did not know?

  I was a white cedar swamp you traversed

  on a wooden walkway above the black water.

  You were a closet from which odd toys

  and bizarre tools fell out on my head.

  Our conversations were conducted

  without a common language.

  I gave you a foot. You handed me a balloon.

  You gave me spurs. I passed you marmalade.

  You thought I bore the past

  like a broad sword swinging

  to cleave you from your fictions

  and perhaps you were right.

  I’m an impolite wind that blows umbrellas

  wrong side to. Now I make you up

  out of pain you deposited in me decades

  ago, eggs of blood red dragonflies.

  I put out stories like weird fruit,

  a cheap mail order novelty: GROW PEACHES

  PLUMS, KIWIS, APPLES ON THE SAME TREE.

  Grandma’s tales, mother’s, friends’ and strangers’:

  you are stirred and mixed with them

  in the incandescent melting pot of my mind.

  I mother you into new ferment

  who would not brother me.

  Brotherless seven: Endless end

  I have trouble understanding

  when something is done

  that was not finished.

  I have to let you go

  since I lack a hold,

  no connection beyond a history

  you had abandoned

  like worn out clothes

  delivered to Goodwill.

  Lives are full of broken dishes

  and promises, stories left

  half told, apologies

  that come back like letters

  with insufficient postage,

  keys that open no known doors.

  The abandoned live with an absence

  that shaped them like the canyon

  of a river gone dry.

  Do I mourn you, Phoenix hedonist,

  or the man in the mirror

  you killed in 1945,

  because he was dragging you down?

  I have made my own brothers,

  my sisters. It is hard

  to say goodbye to nothing

  personal, mouthfuls bitten off

  of silence and wet ashes.

  from

  Early Grrrl

  The correct method of worshipping cats

  For her name is, She who must be petted.

  For her name is, She who eats from the flowered plate.

  For her name is, She who wants the door always opened.

  For her name is, She who must sleep between your legs.

  And he is called, He who must be played with until he drops.

  He is called, He who can wail loudest of all.

  He is called, He who eats also from your plate.

  He is called, He who sleeps in the softest chair.

  And they are known as eaters and rollers in catnip

  Famous among the nations for resonant purring.

  Feared among the mouse multitudes. The voles

  and moles also do run from their shadow.

  For they perform cossack dances at 4 a.m.

  For they stick their faces in your face and meow.

  For they sit on the computer monitor to monitor your work.

  For they make you laugh with their silly acrobatics

  but their dignity is that of the oldest gods.

  Because of all this we are permitted to serve them.

  We are the cat servants, some well trained and some ill,

  and they give us nothing but love and trouble.

  The well preserved man

  He was dug up from a bog

  where the acid tanned him

  like a good leather workboot.

  He is complete, teeth, elbows,

  toenails and stomach, penis,

  the last meal he was fed.

  Sacrificed to a god or goddess

  for fertility, good weather,

  an end to a plague, who knows?

  Only he was fed and then killed,

  as I began to realize as you

  ordered the expensive wine,

  urged lobster or steak, you

  whose eyes always toted the bill,

  I was to be terminated that night.

  I could not eat my last meal.

  I kept running to the ladies room.

  All I could do was drink and try,

  try not to weep at the table.

  I was green as May leaves opening wetly,

  I was new as a never folded dollar,

  a child who didn’t know how the old

  story always ended. Sacrificed

  to a woman with more to offer,

  the new May queen, lady of prominent

  family, like the bog man I was

  strangled with little bruising.

  I lay in my bed with arms folded

  believing my life had bled out.

  How astonished I was to survive,

  to find I was intact and hungry.

  All that happened was I knew the story

  now and I grew long nails and teeth.

  Nightcrawler

  Easy sleepers tucked in their white envelopes

  with a seal that only dawn’s alarm will break:

  with envy I lift away the sides of houses.

  Their snores arise like furry incense.

  Shunted like a boxcar through broken switches

  I rattle down prairie ghostlands of remember

  past rusty flyblown sagging shingle towns

  where the rusty sign of want creaks in the wind.

  Floodlit by a blind eyeball of moon,

  the past here is continuously performed,

  an all night movie for insomniacs.

  The floor is sticky with candy or with blood.

  Voyeur, I spy on my own dead, in action.

  Glued to that dim keyhole, I shout at them

  Hold on! Put down that bottle. Toss those pills.

  Next week a love letter will come with a check.

  They don’t listen. They break each other’s

  bones. They rub ground glass into their eyes

  as blood flows out like satin under the door.

  Always a phone rings in an empty house.

  Easy sleepers, do ghosts ride your rails

  all night telling stories you dread hearing?

  This train runs backward toward old deaths

  as fast as I pull forward toward new ones.

  I vow to sleep through it

  I hate New Year’s Eve.

  I remember the panic to have

  something, anything to do,

  some kind of date

  animal, vegetable, mineral,

  a giant walking carrot,

  a boa constrictor, a ferret,

  an orangutan, a lump of coal.

  I remember ringing apartment

  bells on 114th Street

  looking for a rumored party.

  Parties with lab punch:

  Mogen David, grapefruit juice

  and lab alcohol, hangovers

  guaranteed to anyone within

  ten yards of the foaming punchbowl.

  I wake the next morning

  with my mouth full of mouse

  turds and wood ashes.

  I wake and remember

  how I tried to demonstrate

  the hula, my hips banging

  like a misloaded washer,

  how I made out with a toad.

  I remember limp parties,

  parties askew, everyone

  straggling home with the wrong

  mate, the false match.

  Evenings endless and boring

  as a bowling tournament

  at the senior center.

  Is it midnight yet?

  Only 9:30? Only

  9:38? At midnight />
  we will spill drinks on

  each other’s clothes, kiss

  the boors and bores we detest,

  the new year like a white

  tablecloth on which a drink

  has already been spilled.

  Midsummer night’s stroll

  The attenuated silvery evenings of northern summer,

  they are at once languid and fierce, white Persian

  cats preparing to mate. They are pale lilies

  whose fragrance paints the air of a bedroom.

  The light is milky, suave and must be entered.

  Who can sit inside with the lights on?

  This mauve sky wants to soak through your skin.

  Your body will float like a cherry blossom fallen

  on a slowly moving mirroring river.

  This glow will not tan but lighten your flesh

  till you find yourself borne up as pollen.

  Words escape you like birds startled awake.

  Your lover’s face floats on this dusk, an alien

  moon. You rise and vanish in the sky like a balloon.

  The name of that country is lonesome

  We go to meet our favorite programs

  the way we might have met a lover,

  the mixture of the familiar routine

  and the unexpected revelation.

  We can buy love at the shelter

  if we get there before they have

  executed it for being unwanted,

  its fur cooling in the garbage.

  It becomes more and more unusual

  to be invited to dinner;

  fast food is the family feast.

  Who can be bothered with friends?

  They have needs, you have to remember

  their birthdays, they want to talk

  when you’re just too tired.

 

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