Women have, obviously, cycles like the moon.
My next poem is about this-- about the ever changing variety
of a woman.
In the poem, which is called "Nude With a Red Handbag,"
this particular woman, this particular nude,
at the worst part of her cycle hurls her handbag
at her friend in horror at the death
which is in the relationship, because at the point
of menstruation she realizes that yet another death has
occurred.
The relationship is unproductive.
It's about the changing feelings in the woman
and the response of the man.
I refer in it to Lucy.
Lucy is the Virgin Saint of the winter solstice, the sort
of lowest point of the year.
"Nude With a Red Handbag."
This menstruous nude with handbag
red and stuffed hurls it with all her sorrows at my head.
My menstruous nude with handbag stuffed and red
has with her air of walking naked bluffed the world
to think she bares herself alone.
Now what cargo of dead weights ballast
pours from her flowering open handbag, falling through air.
Sunspot engendering storms, collapsing sandstone.
She who is my trapped, my trappist model,
makes her own self-portrait, mixing blood with air.
She laughs and weeps to see her certain failure.
Love letters tumbling from her pallet box
are slender tombstones, ancient fever charts.
I turn to console her, turn to dry her tears,
already in fallopian sky, her satellite
veers to the dark start of the crescent.
She squats, absorbed in perilous, Delphic mysteries,
like one plugging a hole with dynamite,
then puts our love back on, no longer tight.
Caresses, smiles, surprised at my surprise.
Once more she is my Lucy of the solstice, Madonna light,
emerging from the pilot cabin in her guise
of the blue stewardess to hijack me from my false flight.
Almost she has forgotten that another fruitless month
has fallen from the calendar.
She gathers up her bag, and it is slender.
Its clasps join smoothly as we move together.
It seems to her so clear that any nude who
lugs from death to death a stuffed red bag,
and turns each moon into a blistered hag
must be allowed her cave of solitude.