Read Moon Is Always Female for Free Online Page A

its zigzag
    as my gaze is. Then I see you,
    big, much bigger than I feel
    spiders ought to be. Black and gold
    you are a shiny brooch with legs
    of derricks. I remind you
    I am a general friend to your
    kind. I rescue your kinfolk
    from the bathtub fall mornings
    before I run the water. I
    remind you nervously we are
    artisans, we both make out
    of what we take in and what
    we pass through our guts a patterned
    object slung on the world.
    I detour your net carefully
    picking my way through the
    pumpkin vines. The mother
    of nightmares fatal and hungry,
    you kill for a living. Beauty
    is only a sideline, and your mate
    approaches you with infinite
    caution or you eat him too.
    You stare at me, you do not
    scuttle or hide, you wait.
    I go round and leave you mistress
    of your territory, not in
    kindness but in awe. Stay
    out of my dreams, Hecate
    of the garden patch, Argiope.

     From the tool and die shop
    All right, using myself like the eggs,
    the butter, the flour measured out
    for a cake that in no way recalls
    the modest piles from which its golden
    sponge was assembled, is my pain
    only raw ingredient?
    If aches are wrought into artifact,
    if spilled blood is read for omens
    and my outcries are carefully shaped
    for perusal, do I hurt less?
    Probably. The effort distracts.
    Is art a better aspirin?
    The worm decorates its burrows
    in tidal silt with bits of shell.
    My cat sits washing her fur, arranging
    each hair. If she misses a leap,
    she pretends she meant to. Art is
    part apology, part artifice, part act.
    I writhe in pain, bellow want, purr
    my sensual ease while the richest part
    of what I touched sticks to my fingers.
    Words say more than they mean. The poems
    turn toward you out of my dirt and the best
    know far more than I, far more than me.

     For the young who want to
    Talent is what they say
    you have after the novel
    is published and favorably
    reviewed. Beforehand what
    you have is a tedious
    delusion, a hobby like knitting.
    Work is what you have done
    after the play is produced
    and the audience claps.
    Before that friends keep asking
    when you are planning to go
    out and get a job.
    Genius is what they know you
    had after the third volume
    of remarkable poems. Earlier
    they accuse you of withdrawing,
    ask why you don’t have a baby,
    call you a bum.
    The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
    take workshops with fancy names
    when all you can really
    learn is a few techniques,
    typing instructions and some-
    body else’s mannerisms
    is that every artist lacks
    a license to hang on the wall
    like your optician, your vet
    proving you may be a clumsy sadist
    whose fillings fall into the stew
    but you’re certified a dentist.
    The real writer is one
    who really writes. Talent
    is an invention like phlogiston
    after the fact of fire.
    Work is its own cure. You have to
    like it better than being loved.

 
    Memo to: Alta, Margaret Atwood, Olga Broumas, Diane DiPrima, Miriam Dyak, Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, June Jordan, Faye Kicknosway, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Karen Lindsey, Audre Lorde, Mary Mackey, Honor Moore, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, Kathleen Spivack, Alice Walker, and all the rest of us female poets
    Subject: Alternatives to what has become expected
    When living resembles airport food;
    when the morning paper hands you Chile
    with the throat slit; the black children of South
    Africa wounded thrashing like fish in a basket,
    blood on asphalt the sun dries; when your last lover
    announces her conversion to the Reverend Moon
    explaining how your impure body impeded her pure mind;
    when the second to last lover publishes
    his novel in which you sprawl with your legs
    spread saying all those things he always
    wanted you to say, garish scenes you will have
    to live with as if you had lived them
    like a candid snap of you
    on the toilet for the next twenty years;
    when your daughter elopes with an FBI accountant
    stealing your only credit card; when your son
    shoots sugar and