You didn’t ask, but since
You didn’t, my body’s a brick
Of longing & sorrow, pure red
Blood beaming stars down
Down down into the center of the Earth
I said it WAS a brick, not that it is
LIKE one. This one calls me Miss
Shaves his legs, shows me his cock in sheer
Black stockings, explains his intuitive
Desire to capitalize You when addressing
Me. I feel a growing desire to worship
The Feminine, he says. I do too
I answer, with a ruefulness I know he
Won’t detect. I know its immensity
But I also know the shit and blood
Through which my body teaches
Me the majesty of this burden
Which I wonder if this new man
Will ever understand. Beauty
Is the wage of pain. I wanted
To write, Beauty WAS pain’s
Wage, the dilation of your every
Cell into an ocean, the Atlantic,
That knows human action made
Of it a grave, and all the fishes
And creatures know what we did,
The souls carried across in chains,
The souls who could not return home
Without first dropping to the very bottom
Of the water. What if I told you
That’s what I feel when I bleed?
With my ex I had the same fight
A few different ways, early in our
Love. I said I felt I was perhaps
Clinging jealously to my own pain,
To the way it monthly beats
Out metronomically and metonymically
My responsibility to everything in my own
Bloodline, the blood I let, my shame
Mixed with relief that yet another
Month has passed I did not fill up with child,
And my sense of belonging in the order of things,
Tidal, a schedule for all grief.
I told them, and it made them weep, and hurt
Them very badly, that this was womanhood
To me, the very bottom of it, the deepmost
And that without this rhythm, I wasn’t
Sure a person could know, really know
What it is. What it is to be
A woman.
$%^/! said he loved me. I was certain
That the fact he said it proves
He didn’t mean it. Then of course
His life fell apart. I want
To protect you he said. I was certain
He was only able to say so because he can’t.
Do you want me to tell you what I loved?
That he would even say that at all.
That he would feel it and say so
Even as I saw right through it
A couple of days later in a place
I was sure he would not see me, that no
One would, I allowed myself to grieve it.
Nobody protects me. The ones who
Tried bored me, infuriated me
The ones I loved
Our need for one another grew complacent
It’s four years now since I fell in love.
I saw something in your face said $%^/!.
This is an impossibly beautiful face,
He said, this is a face you did not show
Me downstairs. You don’t get to choose
Who sees your secret face. I mean, I guess
You get to choose who gets a chance.
Some people will stare and stare
Never knowing what is before them
Others, mesmerized by graven images
Stand stock still, the head bent
Over the glowing screen,
Nape of the neck open and revealed
For demonic entities to come and sup
Upon the soul, and suck the soul of you out
Through straws and vile probosci
And other lurid means. Because
$%^/! had the gall to declare his
Love and I the machismo to reply,
Don’t worry, that one doesn’t count,
You blurted that out way too early, while
My body, innocent and adoring,
Rushed to bleed. My tits swelled
Under his hands and stayed
Hard for days and every cell
In me filled up with a sort of sea
Maternal, exquisite lamentation
I can hardly stand
A roundness I fear
A lushness, a goodness, a willingness even
To die for love that frightens me.
“Trying to hold back the tide”
Was how I felt in the presence
Of Juliana and Manuel.
Stendhal syndrome. It did not
Matter that I had no idea
Whether they needed me at all
Or that when they said come
To our bed and I said no,
It would not happen again.
I wanted to disappear into them.
I wanted to give them me.
Please believe me
It is seldom I feel this totally
I still don’t understand why I resisted
Mine own self so mightily
With a couple I guess there’s always the fear
They have each other and will be done
With you, will drop you once you’ve made
Them happy. For a woman like me
Who could never make her parents happy
Who had to find life without ever
Knowing their love as anything but
A distant memory, there’s no deeper
Ocean of promise than two people
Like that. And anyway
I have never met any two people
Like that, apart from them. I bet
Everyone they meet falls for them
The way I did. But no one more deeply
Than me. And no one fought
Her own disappearance into
Them, or longed for it more
Mightily than me. The worst
Part of writing as I am now,
About $%^/! who claimed to
Love me, and &*{}@</ who
Writes me Miss and You, and Julian
To whom I was so desperately true
Though they’d never believe me
And I hurt them so badly
And poured into them my naked pain
Trusted them with it as I’ve never trusted anyone
But they could not trust me with theirs
And for that I am so sorry that I’m crying
And I think of a sound like wailing
Wind and human breath in the conches
And like human lungs forcing air
To spiral down the horn of the ram
And it sounds like my own blood descending
And it feels like the longing
Unspeakable, enormous, multiplying the cells
Of air like dancing devils on my untouched skin
The air itself is love
It whinnies and bucks, it eddies and pools
It harasses me, it mocks me, it covers me, it adores me
It knows what I feel and it feels it too
For years, years, letting bodies fall
Against me, offering souls safe harbor,
Not too many and not too few, practicing
This private, purgatorial art of
Loving secretly, of letting a tiny bit of love
Seep out into them, fall over them,
While simultaneously hiding from them in the dark,
Using my body to hide from them.
Leaving them and letting them come back,
Opening the door for her, opening the door for him,
For them, to hide in them and hide from them again.
I want to love so badly that I will cry.
The fact is I am crying
The only person I’m writing this for is me.
I wouldn’t expect you to care. I’m past
Even wanting you to see. I’m not the only
Lost soul in Purgatory. I’m one
Only guileless enough to say it.
$%^/!’s silky body, giant hands
Huge black boots in the hall
Cock growing against me, exuberant heart,
Heart he hides behind his cock
And like anyone with a serious habit
He’s the only one who believes he can conceal it.
It’s hard for me to show vulnerability early in romance
I stammeringly say, and I almost manage
To explain I put it all only in one place
The only quote unquote safe space
For it I’ve found, and by safe what I really
Mean is spacious—it actually has
Nothing to do with safety—and everything
To do with space. Space, a space
Where Truth can radiate in the just,
The genuine proportion to herself—
That is where I’m writing. My arms
Are shimmering with the truth of this
My blood feels like a foaling
Mare. It feels like Veuve Cliquot
I am trying to describe love to you
Because I am not in it—yet I am
Because I give a little to every lover
And each one exhausts me, because
Holding back exhausts me, but if I do not
Withstand the yearning, as Rilke’s bowstring
Quiveringly endures, I will be lost.
Or so I feel. Or so I fear.
Or so I feel. I wanted so badly to be a woman.
Only love could make me a woman.
I wanted so badly to speak.
A NOTE TO THE READER:
Normally I write these moon poems during the lunation in question. I make notes throughout the month, and sometimes try to intend what will come through, but it's always a surprise, and seldom what I hoped for or intended. Writing this way has been occasionally terrifying: it often pushes me into spaces of real risk: that I might violate or deform an intimate truth and thus do harm to very real and unfolding circumstances, that I might hurt someone I love, or someone I don’t know, that I might hurt myself by saying wrong what I scarcely know how to put into words. I think the whole attraction, for me, of poetry, is the idea of trying to say what can't be said.
This month’s poem actually came to me ten days early, shortly before the solstice. A lover had said things to me, things I did not believe, that seemed to stimulate my menstrual cycle. Ten days early, this poem flooded out of me right as I started to bleed. It was somewhat embarrassing, and also undeniable, as I wrote, to recognize that in me somehow the poetic impulse seems to have yoked itself to my moon cycle, and that writing monthly for Artforum over the years has actually played an important role in this fusion.
I am not the first artist to notice a link between creativity and sexuality, but I will say I have not had enough to read, or artwork to look at, that testifies to a queer, femme, bloody virility, a menstrual consciousness that is not necessarily—and perhaps even necessarily NOT—about bringing children into the world, but rather, is somehow married to a different kind of bringing-forth.
This puts me, and therefore you, dear reader, in the odd circumstance of reckoning, on this Full Moon in Cancer, with the ways that I might also have, over the years, identified my own grief cycle too closely with what I have understood as womanhood. Perhaps the most powerful and most important love of my life to date was a trans poet of genius, and this very problem of mine—this clinging to the grief of my menstrual cycle as though it were my only true prize—it caused them great pain. That I understood my own womanhood so narrowly, it hurt them. I write about this in the poem. And when I read the poem, you can hear how this has hurt me too.
The overidentification with grief is a mistake. The notion that one's deepmost pain defines one—it is a siren song I have been responding too, like a faithful dog, the whole length of my career. Readers of this column know that I write often of my mother and grandmother. Writing this poem made me realize that everything I’ve written up to now has been for them. My grandmother was a Cancer. The love of her life was gassed at Treblinka. My mother, whom many of you know has been mentally ill and often homeless since I was in my late teens, well, both women represent for me a kind of old-world femininity—a fertility made of yearning, death, delusion, tragedy, and the music of Chopin and Schumann.
Once my tears were dry, I realized that this pain I have for so long mistook for womanhood itself was actually the very specific grief of the women I happen to have come from.
I chose to share this poem with Artforum’s readers this month after sharing it with my friends first, and then with a slightly wider circle of colleagues and readers, because the fullness of its emotion, the sometimes overwhelming and shameful experience of femininity, the yearning to love and the failure to love, the ways the reproductive cycle remains a tricky, somewhat occult, and even taboo subject—all this falls within Cancer and the Moon’s domain.
I hope for a queerness that can affirm the Feminine in all its forms and vice versa. Writing is one of the ways I learn to love. If you've been reading me, you already know that I am a very bloody, short, femme, Jewish queer poet who often wants to be a better person than she, in fact, is. Writing this poem was cathartic for me. It says things I no longer feel, or believe. It was transformative. I hope that, in sharing this experience with you, you might feel encouraged that you too can evolve and transform, whether suddenly, or cyclically, or both.
