Devolution of the Nude – Lynne McMahon
In Whitman’s day there were the street bathers
spied on by his poem’s spinster, yearning
behind the glass; in Emerson’s day
and Thoreau’s; in the Utopian societies eager
to transmute the dross of Puritanism into the gold
of burnished flesh; in every century or half-
century there have been faddists who know
the six openings of the body must go
unstopped, that the distinction between man
and woman is holy, and the expulsion from
the garden was the garment district’s
first advertisement ploy.
In our day
there are perhaps fewer of these: acid rain
and factory seepage combine to forecast another
ice-age (this time the glacier greens with alloys),
have made stoppering hygenic;
and we’ve discovered in place of the open,
the principle of the closed, the Victorian tenet
that covered is more alluring than bare,
that Shame’s the secret passageway
to Eros. Ant though we may laugh at Marianne
Moore’s remark―“I like the nude,” she said,
handing back Kenneth Clark’s book, “but
in moderation”—it is us
we find
swathed in bedclothes, as if we were asthmatic
invalids under covers, calming ourselves
with penlights and turn-of-the-century novels
whose characters’ cumbersome cloaks
and flannel layers protect them, protect us,
from what is only whispered of: the difficult
birth in the back room, the laying out
of the dead in the parlor, the two occasions
for nakedness that are dreadful
and not for our eyes—
not yet.
* * *
Inspiration– Sherod Santos
Say what we will, at times it seems the rarest
Moments, the most splenetic trills, the most
Ecstatic gestures, are conceived in sloth
And degradation and executed by a great unstaggered
Surge of feeling which bursts forth suddenly
Like a yard given over to day lilies, surprise lilies,
Naked ladies, to the spiked, thumbed, overlooked
Phallus of the yucca plant, to the carmined
Secret of the flowering dogwood’s uninfected petals
Falling around you sunbathing naked in the grass
Like Susanna among the Elders, to the goat-horned
Furl of the climbing fern, to the certain posture
The May apple chooses to display itself, to the heart-
Raking itch of wood lice in the oak, to the coming
Darkness, to the secret balance, to the extreme
And desolate flowering of the night-blooming cereus,
And to all those things, all that loosestrife,
Spiderwort, tickweed and flax, all those hidden
Gothic amplitudes which leave us finally,
Tattooed and senseless, trembling on the stair.
from the anthology New American Poets edited by Jack Myers & Roger Weingarten, publisher: David R. Godine
in English · Texts · Poetry