Sex and
Poetry - Jeffrey
Harrison
(After a friend asked me why
I didn’t write more poems about sex)
I didn’t write more poems about sex)
For one
thing, it’s hard to get away with,
caught as
we are red-handed in the Chamber
of Mimesis,
one of those kinky rooms
with
mirrors all over the walls and ceiling
where we
hope to satisfy our unspeakable needs
but get
instead an abyss of dwindling reflections.
Also, it’s
less like being in bed with a lover
than
standing alone in front of a copy machine
xeroxing
her panties and bra. Snaps and garters
give way to
the block ant tackle of narrative,
which no
amount of fumbling will undo.
Now tell
me, does that sound like fun to you?
Sometimes,
however, while we are looking
elsewhere,
the green-gold dust of pollen falls
and begins
to settle over everything
like an idea
that takes over without out knowing
and adds a
glow to whatever we see,
and we find
ourselves in the middle of a sentence,
we want to
keep going, clause after clause,
as if the
sinuosities of syntax were
the suave
unfolding of limbs and skin
and language
a seduction to which we love
to succumb,
feeling the words take shape in our mouths
and tasting
them on someone else’s tongue.
* * *
The Gulf
Between the Given and the Gift – Heather McHugh
Between the driven and the drift, you’re moved −
whether air, or a cattle prod, does it.
Art, said the naturalist, in heaven. Said the blind:
Long time no touch. The hooker interjected:
Come again. But I, I once more was unable
even to converse. (I could not get the lion
out of my mind, intending to tear a gazelle
from the love of the leap of her life.) There was much
we would catch. There was much we would miss.
There was gone we would have to do twice.
from the anthology Poets of the New Century edited by Roger Weingarten
& Richard Higgerson, publisher: David R. Godine