προγραφές

Sex and Poetry - Jeffrey Harrison

(After a friend asked me why
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