by David Lehman
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
(1954)
DAVID WAGONER (BORN 1926)
Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love
She’s like a singer straying slowly off-key
While trying too hard to remember the words to a song
Without words, and her accompanist
Is metronomically dead set
To sustain her pitch and tempo, and meanwhile
Under their feathers and springs, under their carpet,
Under my own ceiling, I try to go on
Making something or other out of nothing
But those missing words, whose rhythm is only
Predictable for unpredictable moments
And then erratic, unforeseeable even
At its source where it ought to be abundantly,
Even painfully clear. A song is a series of vowels
Interrupted and shaped by harder consonants
And silence, and gifted singers say, if you can
Pronounce words and remember how to breathe,
You can sing. Although I know some words by heart
And think I know how to breathe (even down here
At work alone) and may be able sometimes
To write some of them down, right now it seems
Improbable they’ll have anything much like
The permissive diction, the mounting cadences,
Now, or then or now again the suspended
Poise, the drift backward, the surprise
Of the suddenly almost soundless catch
Of the caught breath, the quick
Loss of support
Which wasn’t lost at all as it turns out
But found again and even again
Somewhere, in midair, far, far above me.
(2006)
GALWAY KINNELL (BORN 1927)
Last Gods
She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. She opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime—the intimacy
of the visible world. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth.
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke, jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and sucks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human mouth. Now in the lake
two faces float, looking up
at a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.
(1990)
DONALD HALL (BORN 1928)
When I Was Young
When I was young and sexual
I looked forward to a cool Olympian age
for release from my obsessions.
Ho, ho, ho. At sixty the body’s one desire
sustains my pulse, not to mention
my groin, as much as it ever did, if not quite
so often. When I gaze at your
bottom as you bend gardening, or at your breasts,
or at your face with its helmet
of sensuous hair, or at your eyes proposing
the text of our next encounter,
my attention departs from history, baseball,
food, poetry, and deathless fame.
Let us pull back the blanket, slide off our
bluejeans, assume familiar positions,
and celebrate lust in Mortality Mansions.
(1993)
ANNE SEXTON (1928–1974)
December 11th
Then I think of you in bed,
your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,
of the houses that you swing into,
of the steel wool hair on your head,
of your persistent hands and then
how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.
How you come and take my blood cup
and link me together and take my brine.
We are bare. We are stripped to the bone
and we swim in tandem and go up and up
the river, the identical river called Mine
and we enter together. No one’s alone.
(1967)
RICHARD HOWARD (BORN 1929)
Move Still, Still So
for Sanford Friedman
Now that I am nearly sixty, I venture to do very unconventional things.
—Lewis Carroll
1925
…bothers me, Doctor, more than the rest,
more than anything
I’ve told you so far—
anything, that is, I could tell you.
You see, I have this
feeling, actually
a need…I don’t know what to call it—yes,
that’s right, tendency :
you know what I mean,
you always know, I suppose that’s why
I’m here at all or
why I keep coming
back to you when nothing ever seems
to change…I have this
“tendency” to lie
perfectly still when he wants me to
let him inside me,
all of a sudden
I turn passive—how I hate that word!
I mean I don’t feel
anything is wrong,
but it always happens, just before…
I suppose nothing
private is really
shocking, so long as it remains yours,
but I wish I knew
if other women
felt this way. I mean, it seems as if
once he’s in there I’m
waiting for something.
The stillness bothers me. Why can’t I
accept it? Not what
he’s doing there, but
the stillness: I can’t bear it. Why is that?
1895
And was it my fault
it rained Gladyses
and globes? Quite right of Mrs. Grundy,
sending you to bed
one whole day before
your usual time, and since you broke
the window, making
you mend it yourself
with a needle and thread…Now, Gladys,
don’t fidget so much,
listen to what I say;
I know ways of fixing a restless
child for photographs:
I wedge her, standing,
into the corner of a room, or
if she’s lying down,
into the angle
of a sofa. Gladys child, look here
into the lens, and
I’ll tell you something…
All these years, Doctor, and I never
knew: was I having
it or wasn’t I?
What I thoug
ht I was supposed to have
wasn’t what he thought
I should be having,
and to this day I don’t think he knows,
or any man knows—
do you know, Doctor?
Does it matter if you know or not?
How could a man know—
how or even when
a woman has such things for herself.
Men all imagine
it’s the same as theirs,
and of course they think there’s only one…
is something inside
people, not anything from outside.
To borrow a word
from Mrs. Grundy,
there must be a knot tied in the thread
before we can sew.
Your pose is my knot,
and this camera my way to sew…
Did you ever see
a needle so huge?
Of course, having such a thing at home
is preposterous:
it is by having
preposterous possessions that one can
keep them at arm’s length…
Before it happens
I don’t move, almost not breathing at all,
and I think it’s that,
the lack of response
he gets discouraged by. He thinks I’m
dead. I wouldn’t mind
letting on, Doctor,
but if it happens I just can’t speak—
I can’t even move.
He thinks it happens
only when I pretend it happens…
Now that I’ve made friends
with a real Princess,
I don’t intend ever to speak to
any more children
who haven’t titles;
but perhaps you have a title, dear,
and you don’t know it.
I’m cantankerous,
but not about that sort of thing—about
cooking and grammar
and dresses and dogs…
Sometimes I pretend—to save his pride
and prevent a row.
It seems politer,
that way: why be rude about such things?
Now try it a few
minutes like that, child.
Lovely, lovely—one hardly sees why
this little princess
should ever need be
covered up by dreadful crinolines.
Much better that way.
Princess Perdita,
have I told you about her, Gladys?
the one in the Tale
from Shakespeare, who thought
she was a shepherdess, when in fact
she was a real live
princess all the time!
It can happen, and it does, without
tremendous effort,
but unless I take
control and make it the way I want,
it won’t work at all…
At a certain point
I have to stop trying to fool him
and focus all my
forces on myself.
There must be a feeling that the waves
will come to a crest
—higher waves. Doctor,
sometimes it seems like too much trouble…
When the prince saw her—
not doing anything,
just being herself, singing a song
and dancing a bit
at the sheep-shearing,
you know what he told her? Now listen!
What you do, he said,
not even guessing
she was a princess, and Perdita
not knowing either,
still betters what is done. When you speak
I’d have you do it ever, when you sing
I’d have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
and for the ordering of your affairs,
to sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you
a wave of the sea, that you might ever do
nothing but that, move still, still so,
and own no other function…
Of course it’s entirely personal—
there’s no way to share
what happens to me,
but I like it that he’s there. I always
want to keep my eyes
open, I do try
to make myself feel that much closer
to him, but meanwhile
all I’m conscious of—
the only thing, to tell the truth, is
my own pleasure. There!
That time I said it,
my own pleasure : that is what it is!
And you’ll see, Gladys,
that’s what photographs
can do, make you a wave of the sea
that you might ever
do nothing but that…
So very soon the child-face is gone
forever, sometimes
it is not even
there in children—hired models are
plebeian, they have
thick ankles and tend
to be heavy, which I cannot admire.
And of course I must
have little girls, you know
I do not admire naked little boys
in pictures—they seem
to need clothes, always,
whereas one hardly sees why the forms
of little girls should
ever be covered.
I can’t make it happen without the right
imagining. Sometimes
I can’t bring it off
and I cast around in my mind for
proper images—
rather improper,
I’m afraid. I may manage to keep
high and dry by day
but with the last light
I venture into the water, all
that white froth fainting
out into darkness—
as if the world had become one wave…
Stockings, even these
lovely ones, seem to me
such a pity when a child like you has
(as is not always
the case) well-shaped calves.
Yes, that’s it. I think we might venture
to face Mrs. Grundy
to the extent of
making a fairy’s clothes transparent?
I think Mrs. G
might be fairly well
content to find a fairy dressed at all…
I know it isn’t
supposed to matter,
but whoever said it wasn’t so
important for women
must have been a man!
There we are, ready. Now Gladys, dear,
I want you to lie
still, perfectly still.
I’ll help you do it, but the impulse
must be your own. Three
minutes of perfect
stillness will do for both you and me…
I always feel cheated whenever
it happens to him
and not to me too.
I treasure those glimpses of the waves
and the high white foam.
I am suspended
before they fall. Doctor, what happens
in that one moment
of timeless suspense?
I feel cast up, out of life, held there
and then down, broken
on the rocks, tossed back,
part of the ebb and the flow. Doctor,
would you mind if I
just lay here, quite still
for a moment? Just this one time, still…
(1984)
ADRIENNE RICH (BORN 1929)
(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine—tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come—
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.
(1978)
SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)
The Beekeeper’s Daughter
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,
My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest—
A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses
The queen bee marries the winter of your year.
(1959)
JOHN UPDIKE (BORN 1932)
Fellatio
It is beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched in seed,
flower into landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
