The Moon Was A Fat Woman Once

They are always with us, the thin people

Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen. They are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only in a war making evil headlines

when we were small that they famished and grew so lean and

would not round out their stalky limbs again though peace

Plumped the bellies of the mice under the meanest table.

It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere

In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace

Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.

Wrapped in flea ridden donkey skins or bits of burlap,

squatting together on granite steps where

the mica glinted at noonday like broken glass -- famous for their scantness.

Empty of complaint, forever drinking vinegar from tin cups:

they wore the insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn scapegoat.

But so thin,

So ****y a race could not remain in dreams,

Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head

Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat

Out of the side of the generous moon when it set foot nightly in her yard

Until her knife had pared the moon to a rind of little light.

Now the thin people do not obliterate themselves as the dawn

Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline of the world comes clear and fills with color.

They persist in the sunlit room: the wall paper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales

Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.

How they prop each other up!

They outnumber us in the towns and cities.

We own no wildernesses rich and deep enough

For stronghold against their stiff battalions.

See, how the tree boles flatten

And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,

Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest and grayer;

not even moving their bones.