"The Kiss"
by Anne Sexton
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby , you fool !
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.
"Entry October 26"
from This Is My Beloved
by Walter Benton
My heart swells... bulges-
my heart presses againsy my lungs, I cannot breathe,
it rises to my throat and throttles my words-
O it will burst sky-high surely
and a cloud of starlings will fly out!
A swarm of luminous moths...and boisterous starlings!
Why do they stare at me as I stride the village streets,
crossing the crossings against the lights
and recognizing no one?
Are my eyes too bright?
Is my head too high?
Or does it really show, that kiss-
does it sit on my lips like a moth on a leaf,
has your kiss blossomed on my mouth
into a scarlet flower?
"Bacchanalia"
by J. B. Bernstein
I lie
before you soaked
in white orchid, its redolence
assails like devil's fire. And when
you sheathe my body
with your flame, I get drunk
from the blood of you, the flesh of you.
Then, when the new moon mounts
black sky, I inhale your breath
and pray to you: Swallow me
alive.
"I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror"
Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that
woman on all fours, her head
dangling and suffuse, her lean
haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and
ass narrow and pale as a deer's and those
breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth
like plummets, when I
swayed from side to side they swayed, it was
so dark I couldn't tell if they were gold or
plum or rose. I cannot get over her
moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a
fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her
tongue long and black as an anteater's
going toward his body, she was so clearly an
animal, she was an Iroquois scout creeping
naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her
she looked at me so directly, her eyes so
dark, her stare said to me I
belong here, this is mine, I am living out my
true life on this earth.
— Sharon Olds
"I Love Being Lost"
I love being lost
in the sound that mud makes
when it is soft and wet and begs
your fingers to stay a little while longer
and please play some more in my earth
smell this beautiful terra firma consuming you
begging you to forsake the skillful architecture of
your hands
to make a more marvelous mess
and I love you saying look baby I have found
this branch of myself that I can use to dig
your sweet red clay to death and I say yes dig me baby
dig me as if planting love like crocuses
beneath the window of my hips.
- Karen Garrison
"Laughing Thoroughbreds"
by Patti Tana
how many times
have I borne you
through the velvet night O
my thighs wrapped
tight O my thoroughbred
our small bed
vast space
where we birth
uncontrollable laughter O
my body
no longer woman
but silken flesh
on sinewy legs
galloping galloping
"The Gateway"
by Alec Derwent Hope
Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices
To hear this city of cells, my body, sing.
The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces
Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring.
And the sweet waters without intermission
Climb to the tips of its green tenement;
The breasts have borne the grace of their possession,
The lips have felt the pressure of content.
Here I come home: in this expected country
They know my name and speak it with delight.
I am the dream and you my gates of entry,
The means by which I waken into light.
"Awakening"
Fingers of morning sunlight
reach across my bed.
Your touch at my shoulder,
light as the wing of a white butterfly,
traces curves and hollows,
siphons passion
to the point of skin
on skin.
I learn the shape of my collarbone,
awaken to wrist elbow breast and belly.
You paint smiling graffiti
down long brown legs,
twine curlicues
over stretched soles.
Your hand
trails rivulets of spindrift,
blue and hot.
Goosebumps whisper,
beg,
come this way, come this way.
Silken petals unfurl,
dark and pouting.
Your fingers
draw my body
shimmering and whole
into the world.
- Gayle Eleanor
"Touch"
My hands
open the curtains of your being
clothe you in a further nudity
uncover the bodies of your body.
My hands
invent another body for your body.
- Octavio Paz
"Full Summer"
I paused, and paused, over your body,
to feel the current of desire pull
and pull through me. Our hair was still wet,
mine like knotted wrack, it fell
across you as I paused, a soaked coil
around your glans. When one of your hairs
dried, it lifted like a bare nerve.
On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared
in the clear air, a clockwise loop
coming in out of nothing, now the skin of
your scrotum
moved like a live being, an animal,
I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly
stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love
to free it-just so-in joy,
and to sip from the little crying lips
at the tip. Then there was no more pausing,
nor was this the taker,
some new one came
and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding
I was
drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter
over into another world
I had thought I would have to die to reach.
- Sharon Olds
"Coming Together"
Drenched in summer sweat, I beg,
Wait, don't come yet.
The candle burned to its wick.
The heat and humidity compare
to the intensity of our want:
fire inside and out.
Your face contorts with pleasure-
we know we are near the end, spent,
but still I beg, Wait for me,
as I rush to catch up.
My greedy tongue travels your body
like the child I was among the dunes
of the Cape-mysterious, wild, free.
I wonder how the people beyond these walls
can sleep knowing the pleasure
their bodies contain as you scream
Yes!-More!-Harder!-Faster!-God!
until the moment-like two runners
neck and neck at the end of their race-
I demand now and we cross
the finish line as one, come together,
trembling, out of breath.
The wick flickers to its end
and the room goes completely black.
I say I love you, but already
you are asleep, your wet back turned
to me, so I roll to the opposite side
of the bed, find comfort in the cool
wall as I trace old, dried veins of paint
with my thumb. I do not need
to be next to you to know you love me-
it is in the numb joy of my tongue,
the ache of my hip, the pulse beneath
my nipples that recalls your lips.
- Jeff Walt
"The Water Cycle"
You kissed my body to a cloud-
Stratus, cirrus, nimbus,
Gasses swirling,
Furniture for angels,
Punctuation in the changing
Sentence of the sky.
Blown and altered
By the winds of breath,
I float above the landscape
Of our bed.
First cumulo-nimbus,
Then a castle of cumulo-pileus.
I expand, surround you,
Filled with dust and seas,
A plane, a bird,
Turbulence and hail.
I fill with dew.
Light shines through me,
And the earth brightens.
- Alison Stone
"After New Hampshire"
by Rosemary Klein
Folded into each other,
origami hearts, love
knots. Each time
I never believe
we will get any closer.
Afternoon lowers
her eyes as dusk
steals across the vision
of us, still touching.
Silk light.
Silk laughter.
My body floods
its boundaries.
You hold me through
each shudder, each
moan, my head tucked
into your chest, my legs
wrapped around your body,
my body filled with light,
my body light. Past
freedom and individuality
and the delight of my own
opinions, beyond serenity
and rock n’ roll, there is
happiness and I have found
its natural habitat beneath
your kiss and only
in your arms.
"On Entering The Sea"
by Nizar Qabbani
Love happened at last,
And we entered God's paradise,
Sliding
Under the skin of the water
Like fish.
We saw the precious pearls of the sea
And were amazed.
Love happened at last
Without intimidation…with symmetry of wish.
So I gave…and you gave
And we were fair.
It happened with marvelous ease
Like writing with jasmine water,
Like a spring flowing from the ground.
Spring overall. But inside us
there is another unity.
Behind each eye
one glowing weather.
Every forest branch moves differently
in the breeze, but as they sway
they connect at the roots.
- Rumi
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