by David Lehman
interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me
like the Chinese we count 81 thrusts
then 9 more out loud till we both come
I come three times before you do
and then it seems you’re mad and never will
it’s only fair for a woman to come more
think of all the times they didn’t care
(1992)
HONOR MOORE (BORN 1945)
Disparu
I spent the day with invisible you, your arms
invisible around me, holding me blue in your
open invisible eyes. We walked invisible,
invisible and happy, daydreaming sight as if
light were a piano it played on. Invisible
my hand at your well-cut trouser, invisible
speeding night, the invisible taxi, bare
the invisible legs, kissing the vanishing
mouths, breasts invisible, your, my invisible
entwining, the sheets white as geese, blue as sky.
And darling, how your invisible prick rose,
rosy, invisible, invisible as all night
galloping, swinging, we tilted and sang.
(2005)
STAR BLACK (BORN 1946)
The Evangelist
The devil is rising inside you, rising, rising, rising.
He is going to make you do something true, something
sinister and surprising, something demonic and inviting.
The devil is doing his work through you. He isn’t hiding.
You are to burn in the gates of hell: trillions of years,
millenniums, millenniums. Angels are going to mourn for you
in their white, white dresses. Harps will plink sad songs:
you’re the one Peter erases: wrong, wrong, very wrong.
The devil is on your back, riding. The devil is on your back,
gliding. The devil is on your back, whispering words, words
that are heard: sinful, succulent, lascivious words, horror
sounds, coming, coming, rising through you, pitchforked
thumping, hurrying, your veins tubes, hurrying, thunder
ooze, tromp, tromp, tromp, the devil is taking you.
(2007)
ELLEN BASS (BORN 1947)
Gate C22
At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.
Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.
But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
(2002)
AI (BORN 1947)
Twenty-Year Marriage
You keep me waiting in a truck
with its one good wheel stuck in the ditch,
while you piss against the south side of a tree.
Hurry. I’ve got nothing on under my skirt tonight.
That still excites you, but this pickup has no windows
and the seat, one fake leather thigh,
pressed close to mine is cold.
I’m the same size, shape, make as twenty years ago,
but get inside me, start the engine;
you’ll have the strength, the will to move.
I’ll pull, you push, we’ll tear each other in half.
Come on, baby, lay me down on my back.
Pretend you don’t owe me a thing
and maybe we’ll roll out of here,
leaving the past stacked up behind us;
old newspapers nobody’s ever got to read again.
(1973)
JANE KENYON (1947–1995)
The Shirt
The shirt touches his neck
and smoothes over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
(1978)
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (BORN 1947)
Lust
If only he could touch her,
Her name like an old wish
In the stopped weather of salt
On a snail. He longs to be
Words, juicy as passionfruit
On her tongue. He’d do anything,
Would dance three days & nights
To make the most terrible gods
Rise out of ashes of the yew,
To step from the naked
Fray, to be as tender
As meat imagined off
The bluegill’s pearlish
Bones. He longs to be
An orange, to feel fingernails
Run a seam through him.
(2000)
MOLLY PEACOCK (BORN 1947)
She Lays
She lays each beautifully mooned finger
in the furrow on the right and on the left
sides of her clitoris and lets them linger
in their swollen cribs until the wish to see the shaft
exposed lets her move her fingers at the same time
to the right and to the left sides pinning back
the labia in a nest of hair, the pink sack
of folds exposed, the purplish ridge she’ll climb
when she lets one hand re-pin the labia
to free the other to wander with a withheld
purpose as if it were lost in the sands when the Via
To The City suddenly appeared, exposed:
when the whole exhausted mons is finally held by
both hands is when the Via gates are closed,
but they are open now, as open as her
thighs lying open among the arranged pillows.
Secrets have no place in the orchid boat of her
body and old pink brain beneath the willows.
This is self-love, assured, and this is lost time.
This is knowing, knowing, known
since growing, growing, grown;
revelation without astonishment,
understanding what is meant.
This is world-love. This is lost I’m.
(1984)
JAMES CUMMINS (BORN 1948)
The Body Is the Flower
So bondage is a big part
of it, after all—
that old art of rendering a lover submissive:
a tactic, a strategy. Denying somebody’s body
the power to move denies that body the power
to be believed. Isn’t that what’s so sexual?
The intimate plea? The fear you can’t go back?
Until your lover throws you over on your back.
Maybe a woman becomes a man, then. After all,
it’s the head games that conjure up the sexual:
which one agrees, this time, to be submissive;
which one straps on the fetishes, the powers,
we make to make the body yield up the body…
O the rendering, the surrendering of the body!
We so much want to go back, all the way back…
You stand before a mirror, naked, the power
of someone’s eyes, words, erasing you, the all
you claim to be. Belief can be so submissive:
desire, not truth. But being believed is sexual
vantage: the crying out, the echo, the sexual
need you never knew could subjugate the body…
So you cry out at the idea of her, submissive,
yes, her hands your hands, yes, leading you back,
her voice your voice, o god, eyes lips cunt all
mirroring, yes, the glory, o god yes, the power…
Later, you wipe off the remnants of the power
with Kleenex. When you get down to the sexual
level, you get sexually levelled, that’s all:
doesn’t discipline make a believer of the body?
You whisper no name but hers in the going back.
Tomorrow, it will be her turn to be submissive:
the ties that bind render you both submissive.
You’ll need her to believe your plea, her power;
she’ll need you to escort her all the way back,
before the life alongside this life, her body
alongside yours: ravenous, indifferent, sexual.
There, anything might happen, anything at all,
if all you need is to be believed. The power
of the sexual plea masquerades as the submissive
act. The body is the flower of the going back.
(1994)
HEATHER M CHUGH (BORN 1948)
Gig at Big Al’s
There is a special privacy onstage.
Wearing little, then less, then
nudity’s silver high-
heeled shoes, I dance to myself: the men
posed below at tables
with assessors’ gazes and the paycheck’s
sure prerogatives are dreams
I’ve realized, my chosen
people, made-up eyes, my fantasies.
I pull down dark around the room.
I turn on sex’s juke two-step.
I set foot on the spotlight’s
isolated space and grease
my hips and lick my legs. With a whip
lash of gin in the first row anyone
can beat around the bush, can buy
my brand of loneliness, all possible
circumlocutions of crotch. No one
can touch me, by law
I cannot touch myself. So none
of it is public, not until
in one side door
on his soft shoes
my lover comes to watch.
(1977)
LYNN EMANUEL (BORN 1949)
Dreaming of Rio at Sixteen
It was always Raoul’s kisses or grandmother’s
diamond earrings that burned like Brazilian noons
while you and she sheeted beds finding every
beautiful mother an excuse to stop and look
as they moved in sling-back shoes past Lloyd’s
Esso then into the movies’ cool arcades.
Taking off your clothes, sometimes sixteen was
that, sometimes it was not naked but wore
a collar at its throat and gloves, kissed
with its mouth closed, over and over, like the pinch
of a tight shoe. Even all buttoned up, sixteen
was semitropic and summer had put out every lure:
a whole plantation of perfect grasses.
Lynnskala, Lynnksala your grandmother called,
her voice grinding uphill, heavier and heavier,
with its load of anger. Old stab in the dark
stood on the back porch stirring her spoon around
in the dinner bell and calling you in the voice that now
held its hands across its heart, Come home, come
home save yourself for a wedding, while you,
beside the Amazon, were all teeth, all boat.
(1992)
DENIS JOHNSON (BORN 1949)
Poem
Loving you is every bit as fine
as coming over a hill into the sun
at ninety miles an hour darling when
it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking
themselves from the designs of God beneath
the disintegrating orchestra of my black
Chevrolet. The radio clings to an unidentified
station—somewhere a tango suffers,
and the dance floor burns around two lovers
whom nothing can touch—no, not even death!
Oh! the acceleration with which my heart does proceed,
reaching like stars almost but never quite
of light the speed of light the speed of light.
(1987)
DANA GIOIA (BORN 1950)
Alley Cat Love Song
Come into the garden, Fred,
For the neighborhood tabby is gone.
Come into the garden, Fred.
I have nothing but my flea collar on,
And the scent of catnip has gone to my head.
I’ll wait by the screen door till dawn.
The fireflies court in the sweetgum tree.
The nightjar calls from the pine,
And she seems to say in her rhapsody,
“Oh, mustard-brown Fred, be mine!”
The full moon lights my whiskers afire,
And the fur goes erect on my spine.
I hear the frogs in the muddy lake
Croaking from shore to shore.
They’ve one swift season to soothe their ache.
In autumn they sing no more.
So ignore me now, and you’ll hear my meow
As I scratch all night at the door.
(2001)
PAUL JONES (BORN 1950)
To His Penis
after the medieval Welsh poem “Cywydd y Gal,” by Dafydd ap Gwilym
By God, Penis, gypsy gland,
you’ll be guarded with eye and hand.
You stand convicted, straight-headed pole,
of all crass crimes possible;
cunt’s quill, I’ll bridle your snout,
rein you in, lest you creep out.
Take this warning, stiff stinger:
No jamming with jealous singers.
Wretched rolling pin, scrotum’s crown,
don’t rise up, don’t wave around!
God’s gift to good church ladies,
column for their cavities,
sweet snare trigger, sleek young swan
asleep in his own soft down,
moist gun, slick milk-giving switch,
fresh-grown sprout. Be still! Don’t twitch!
Crooked and blunt, accursed spindle,
spike where prim pussies impale;
eel’s harsh head, hearty and brave,
abrupt bar, bundle of staves.
You swell thicker than men’s thighs;
drill that never dulls, love’s spy,
auger who drives deep below,
leather veined lavender-blue,
scepter that grants lusts to grow,
bolt that seals women’s arses closed.
The hol
e in your top, like a pipe,
whistles “fuck” when luck is ripe.
Your strange sight makes all women
charming and comely and warm;
round grinder, hound on the hunt,
you light fire to young tight cunts;
roof-beam boosting maiden’s laps,
your prod sets all bells to clap;
brash rod, you’ve tilled twenty rows,
groin growth raised like a grand nose,
crude inconstant crotch crawler,
lanky and lewd loving lure,
gnarled yet graceful, a goose neck.
Hard nail, you left my home wrecked.
You’re arrested; reed-tall thruster;
hang your head low; loin lounger,
you’ve come under my control,
bold witch’s wand; woe to your soul.
Why am I scorned and called “bad”
when wicked wisdom wins your head?
(1999)
WILLIAM WADSWORTH (BORN 1950)
The Snake in the Garden Considers Daphne
My less erotic god condemned
my taste for girls less classical
than you, the kind that can’t resist
a dazzling advance or trees that stand
for love. Of course I understand
up there it seems to be all light
and prelapsarian elation—but bear
in mind your lower half that gropes
for water, the slender roots you spread
in secret to fascinate the rocks,
while sunlight pries apart your leaves
and flights of birds arouse the air
