Hungry Moon

Henrietta Goodman

• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781885635310
• eBook ISBN:
  9781885635327
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

With intimacy and depth of insight, Henrietta Goodman's Hungry Moon suggests paradox as the most basic mode of knowing ourselves and the world. We need hunger, the poems argue, but also satisfaction. We need pain to know joy, joy to know pain. We need to protect ourselves, but also to take risks. Though the poems are drawn from personal experience, Goodman shares the conviction of such poets as Anne Sexton and Louise Glück that when the poet writes of the self, the self cannot be exempt from culpability. Goodman's speaker ranges through time and locale—from exploring the experience of flying in a small plane with her lover/pilot over the landscape of the American West to addressing the grief and retrospective self-scrutiny that arise from a friend's death. Like the work of Mark Doty and Tony Hoagland, Goodman's poems embrace concrete particularity, entangled as it is with imperfection and loss: "the Quik Stop's fridge full of sandwiches and small bottles of livestock vaccines," "the black, hammer-struck moon of your thumb," "the empty water tower, one rusted panel kicked in like a door."

PART I

HUNGRY MOON

Part of the total fantasy of greed is always the attempt to eat up one’s own appetite.

—Adam Phillips

Driving home I tell my son the moon is full
and he says no, hungry moon because he is two

and wants dinner and sees how the moon follows
our car across the bridge, bobbing unpoppable

above powerlines, the splintery tops of phone poles,
in a sky black and frictionless. Passing over it now,

a little lasso of gray cloud catches, then drifts,
no longer backlit, no longer an empty ring. A string.

If the moon is greedy, then what it wants is to collapse
in on itself—to fly shrinking, shrieking out of orbit.

But if it’s hungry, it can wait—footprints frozen
in lunar dust, some piles of human junk. If greed

is the desire to end hunger once and for all
then greed is a death-wich we eat until we’re gone.

Lab rats live longer if they never get enough.
Hunger brings long life, says the fortune cookie

broken open and left on the table. What we need
is a hunger that feeds on what it eats, the way I watch

my love rack the balls, chalk the cue, then set down
the blue cube like an empty glass, with a deliberate

thump. I’ll never stop. Years ago, I stood on the scale
at 88 pounds, calculating, bloodless, obsessed. I’ve hardly

mentioned it since. But even then I was too sane to starve,
learning to leave hungry only in order to return.

DOG WITH STICK OF DYNAMITE

It’s like a cartoon, the way he runs around us wagging
his tail, part collie, part mystery, his face a double mask
of comedy and tragedy. Ears up in sharp points and he’s a wolf
with eyes like insects caught in amber—soulless, stalled
in history. This is the dog who turned from the trash can
on Christmas Eve, snarling and snapping like a tangle of wire
rolling off a spool, pinned my son to the kitchen floor
with the paws I had called dainty, and tore a two-inch flap
of skin from his skull, ripped his cheek as though it had split
from its own chubbiness, red stuffing spilling out.

This is the dog we rescued, fed, who could fold his ears
down into soft little envelopes, who let me shampoo
his matted fur in the yard with the hose in cold October—
grateful, sharp-ribbed and pale-tongued. Long gone,
he returns, tossing his head, the red stick in his mouth
spitting sparks. We yell Rhodes, Rhodes, drop it, go away,
and he thinks we are playing—the thing in his mouth,
clenched between his teeth, who to blame? He is the same—
the harm both him and not-him—Rhodes, we say,
Rhodes, spit it out, but he never can.

AFTER BIRTH

I was trying to type encyclopedia but kept typing envy
when I got to the part where my son
sprawled on the bed, asking what’s a placenta?
So we went to the envy envy encyclopedia,
so helpfully literal, so unopen to interpretation.
I remembered my own, or his, sliding out
numbly, how a nurse caught it in a bowl
and was going to take it away, but I strained
to sit up, to look. Building a placenta is hard work
the body does without the mind—temporary organ,
bound by the scope of its own necessity.
It was yucky, I tell my son, sticking out my tongue.
How big? he asks, and I say it was like a black brain—
an anti-brain, lumpy pillow with a white
amniotic fringe—

painless, painless, that predictable end.

AURORA

The mother cuts two holes in the white sheet. Her hands
are ice, the child a ghost now except her feet, her hands.

Lambs for graves of children, sheep for mothers.
Too tired to sleep, she stares as years concrete her hands.

In April, the lake is an egg, a sugar skull.
Black water rises up through ice to meet her hands.

Green sheets of light billow on a skyline of what
they want to see—she knows the night will cheat her hands.

How well they remember what they didn’t see: blind
eclipse of N...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• Acknowledgements