by David Lehman
In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the making of the attributes of heroes.
Examine these limbs, red black or white—they are very cunning in
tendon and nerve,
They shall be stript that you may see them.
Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,
good-sized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.
Within there runs his blood, the same old blood, the same red
running blood,
There swells and jets his heart—there all passions and desires—all
reachings and aspirations,
Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in
parlors and lecture-rooms?
This is not only one man, he is the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and
enjoyments.
How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring
through the centuries?
Who might you find you have come from yourself if you could trace
back through the centuries?
8
A woman at auction,
She too is not only herself—she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.
Her daughters or their daughters’ daughters—who knows who shall
mate with them?
Who knows through the centuries what heroes may come from them?
In them and of them natal love—in them the divine mystery—the same
old beautiful mystery.
Have you ever loved a woman?
Your mother—is she living? have you been much with her? and has
she been much with you?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and
times all over the earth?
If life and the soul are sacred the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean strong firm-fibred body is beautiful as
the most beautiful face.
Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool
that corrupted her own live body?
For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.
Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed,
Who degrades or defiles the body of the dead is not more cursed.
9
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
women, nor the likes of the parts of you;
I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul,
(and that they are the soul,)
I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that
they are poems,
Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s,
father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or
sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and
the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the
ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews,
arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger,
finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,
man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel,
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body,
or of any one’s body, male or female,
The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,
The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,
Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,
Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from
woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,
love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving, and
tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the
naked meat of his own body, or another person’s body,
The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward
toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the
marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health,
O I think now these are not the parts and poems of the body only,
but of the soul,
O I think these are the soul!
(1855–1856)
GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823–1890)
from Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love
If she should give me all I ask of her,
The virgin treasures of her modest love;
If lip to lip in eager frenzy clove,
And limb with limb should palpitate and stir
In that wild struggle whose delights confer
A rapture which the jealous gods above
Envy and long for as they coldly move
Through votive fumes of spice and burning myrrh;
Yea, were her beauty thus securely mine,
Forever waiting at my beck and call,
I lord and master of her all in all;
Yet at that weakness I would fret and pine
Which makes exhausted nature trip and fall
Just at the point where it becomes divine.
(1929)
EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)
211
Come slowly—Eden!
Lips unused to Thee—
Bashful—sip thy Jessamines—
As the fainting Bee—
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—
Enters—and is lost in Balms.
(c. 1860)
249
Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile—the Winds—
To a Heart in port—
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!
(1861)
315
He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on—
He stuns you by degrees—
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers—further heard—
Then nearer—Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten—
Your Brain—to bubble Cool—
Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt—
That scalps your naked Soul—
When Winds take Forests in the Paws—
The Universe—is still—
(1862)
1555
I groped for him before I knew
With solemn nameless need
All other bounty sudden chaff
For this foreshadowed Food
Which others taste and spurn and sneer—
Though I within suppose
That consecrated it could be
The only Food that grows
(c. 1882)
1670
In Winter in my Room
I came upon a Worm—
Pink, lank and warm—
But as he was a worm
And worms presume
Not quite with him at home—
Secured him by a string
To something neighboring
And went along.
A Trifle afterward
A thing occurred
I’d not believe it if I heard
But state with creeping blood—
A snake with mottles rare
Surveyed my chamber floor
In feature as the worm before
But ringed with power—
The very string with which
I tied him—too
When he was mean and new
That string was there—
I shrank—“How fair you are”!
Propitiation’s claw—
“Afraid,” he hissed
“Of me”?
“No cordiality”—
He fathomed me—
Then to a Rhythm Slim
Secreted in his Form
As Patterns swim
Projected him.
That time I flew
Both eyes his way
Lest he pursue
Nor ever ceased to run
Till in a distant Town
Towns on from mine
I set me down
This was a dream.
(1914)
EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887)
Assurance
Last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss
Still floated on my lips. For we had strayed
Together in my dream, through some dim glade,
Where the shy moonbeams scarce dared light our bliss.
The air was dank with dew, between the trees,
The hidden glow-worms kindled and were spent.
Cheek pressed to cheek, the cool, the hot night-breeze
Mingled our hair, our breath, and came and went,
As sporting with our passion. Low and deep
Spake in mine ear her voice: “And didst thou dream,
This could be buried? This could be sleep?
And love be thrall to death! Nay, whatso seem,
Have faith, dear heart; this is the thing that is!”
Thereon I woke, and on my lips her kiss.
(1980)
EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)
Terminus
Wonderful was the long secret night you gave me, my
Lover,
Palm to palm, breast to breast in the gloom. The faint
red lamp,
Flushing with magical shadows the common-place room
of the inn,
With its dull impersonal furniture, kindled a mystic
flame
In the heart of the swinging mirror, the glass that has
seen
Faces innumerous & vague of the endless travelling
automata,
Whirled down the ways of the world like dust-eddies
swept through a street,
Faces indifferent or weary, frowns of impatience or pain,
Smiles (if such there were ever) like your smile and mine
when they met
Here, in this self-same glass, while you helped me to
loosen my dress,
And the shadow-mouths melted to one, like sea-birds
that meet in a wave—
Such smiles, yes, such smiles the mirror perhaps has
reflected;
And the low wide bed, as rutted and worn as a
high-road,
The bed with its soot-sodden chintz, the grime of its
brasses,
That has borne the weight of fagged bodies, dust-
stained, averted in sleep,
The hurried, the restless, the aimless—perchance it has
also thrilled
With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies like ours,
Seeking each other’s souls in the depths of unfathomed
caresses,
And through the long windings of passion emerging
again to the stars…
Yes, all this through the room, the passive & featureless
room,
Must have flowed with the rise & fall of the human
unceasing current;
And lying there hushed in your arms, as the waves of
rapture receded,
And far down the margin of being we heard the low
beat of the soul,
I was glad as I thought of those others, the nameless, the
many,
Who perhaps thus had lain and loved for an hour on the
brink of the world,
Secret and fast in the heart of the whirlwind of travel,
The shaking and shrieking of trains, the night-long
shudder of traffic,
Thus, like us they have lain & felt, breast to breast in
the dark,
The fiery rain of possession descend on their limbs
while outside
The black rain of midnight pelted the roof of the
station;
And thus some woman like me, waking alone before
dawn,
While her lover slept, as I woke & heard the calm stir of
your breathing,
Some woman has heard as I heard the farewell shriek of
the trains
Crying good-bye to the city & staggering out into
darkness,
And shaken at heart has thought: “So must we forth in
the darkness,
Sped down the fixed rail of habit by the hand of
implacable fate—
So shall we issue to life, & the rain, & the dull dark
dawning;
You to the wide flare of cities, with windy garlands and
shouting,
Carrying to populous places the freight of holiday
throngs;
I, by waste lands, & stretches of low-skied marsh
To a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town
moulders & shrinks,
And its roofs fall in, & the sluggish feet of the hours
Are printed in grass in its streets; & between the
featureless houses
Languid the town-folk glide to stare at the entering
train,
The train from which no one descends; till one pale
evening of winter,
When it halts on the edge of the town, see, the houses
have turned into grave-stones,
The streets are the grassy paths between the low roofs
of the dead;
And as the train glides in ghosts stand by the doors of
the carriages;
And scarcely the difference is felt—yea, such is the life I
return to…”
Thus may another have thought; thus, as I turned may
have turned
To the sleeping lips at her side, to drink, as I drank
there, oblivion….<
br />
(c. 1909)
ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)
The Subverted Flower
She drew back; he was calm;
“It is this that had the power.”
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.
He smiled for her to smile,
But she was either blind
Or willfully unkind.
He eyed her for a while
For a woman and a puzzle.
He flicked and flung the flower,
And another sort of smile
Caught up like finger tips
The corners of his lips
And cracked his ragged muzzle.
She was standing to the waist
In goldenrod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He stretched her either arm
As if she made it ache
To clasp her—not to harm;
As if he could not spare
To touch her neck and hair.
“If this has come to us
And not to me alone—”
So she thought she heard him say;
Though with every word he spoke
His lips were sucked and blown
And the effort made him choke
Like a tiger at a bone.
She had to lean away.
She dared not stir a foot,
Lest movement should provoke
The demon of pursuit
That slumbers in a brute.
It was then her mother’s call
From inside the garden wall
Made her steal a look of fear
To see if he could hear
And would pounce to end it all
Before her mother came.
She looked and saw the shame:
A hand hung like a paw,
An arm worked like a saw
As if to be persuasive,
An ingratiating laugh
That cut the snout in half,
An eye become evasive.
A girl could only see
That a flower had marred a man,
But what she could not see
Was that the flower might be
Other than base and fetid:
That the flower had done but part,