The Best American Erotic Poems

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