by David Lehman
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.
(1964)
MARK STRAND (BORN 1934)
The Couple
The scene is a midtown station.
The time is 3 a.m.
Jane is alone on the platform,
Humming a requiem.
She leans against the tiles.
She rummages in her purse
For something to ease a headache
That just keeps getting worse.
She went to a boring party,
And left without her date.
Now she’s alone on the platform,
And the trains are running late.
The subway station is empty,
Seedy, sinister, gray.
Enter a well-dressed man
Slowly heading Jane’s way.
The man comes up beside her:
“Excuse me, my name is John.
I hope I haven’t disturbed you.
If I have, then I’ll be gone.
“I had a dream last night
That I would meet somebody new.
After twenty-four hours of waiting,
I’m glad she turned out to be you.”
Oh where are the winds of morning?
Oh where is love at first sight?
A man comes out of nowhere.
Maybe he’s Mr. Right.
How does one find the answer,
If one has waited so long?
A man comes out of nowhere,
He’s probably Mr. Wrong.
Jane imagines the future,
And almost loses heart.
She sees herself as Europe
And John as Bonaparte.
They walk to the end of the platform.
They stumble down to the tracks.
They stand among the wrappers
And empty cigarette packs.
The wind blows through the tunnel.
They listen to the sound.
The way it growls and whistles
Holds them both spellbound.
Jane stares into the dark:
“It’s a wonder sex can be good
When most of the time it comes down to
Whether one shouldn’t or should.”
John looks down at his watch:
“I couldn’t agree with you more,
And often it raises the question—
‘What are you saving it for?’”
They kneel beside each other
As if they were in a trance,
Then Jane lifts up her dress
And John pulls down his pants.
Everyone knows what happens,
Or what two people do
When one is on top of the other
Making a great to-do.
The wind blows through the tunnel
Trying to find the sky.
Jane is breathing her hardest,
And John begins to sigh:
“I’m a Princeton professor.
God knows what drove me to this.
I have a wife and family;
I’ve known marital bliss.
“But things were turning humdrum,
And I felt I was being false.
Every night in our bedroom
I wished I were someplace else.”
What is the weather outside?
What is the weather within
That drives these two to excess
And into the arms of sin?
They are the children of Eros.
They move, but not too fast.
They want to extend their pleasure,
They want the moment to last.
Too bad they cannot hear us.
Too bad we can’t advise.
Fate that brought them together
Has yet another surprise.
Just as they reach the utmost
Peak of their endeavor,
An empty downtown local
Separates them forever.
An empty downtown local
Screams through the grimy air
A couple dies in the subway;
Couples die everywhere.
(1990)
TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983)
Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s
She was pretty swacked by the time she
Put the spaghetti & meatballs into the orgy pasta
bowl—There was mixed salt & pepper in the
“Tittie-tweak” pasta bowl—We drank some dago red
from glazed girlie demi-tasse cups—after
which we engaged in heterosexual intercourse, mutual
masturbation, fellatio, & cunnilingus. For
dessert we stared at a cupboard full of art critic
friends, sgraffitoed into underglazes on vases. We did
have a very nice time.
(1982)
RUSSELL EDSON (BORN 1935)
Conjugal
A man is bending his wife.
He is bending her around something that she has bent herself
around. She is around it, bent as he has bent her.
He is convincing her. It is all so private.
He is bending her around the bedpost. No, he is bending her around
the tripod of his camera. It is as if he teaches her to swim. As if he
teaches acrobatics. As if he could form her into something wet that
he delivers out of one life into another.
And it is such a private thing the thing they do.
He is forming her into the wallpaper. He is smoothing her down into
the flowers there. He is finding her nipples there. And he is kissing
her pubis there.
He climbs into the wallpaper among the flowers. And his buttocks
move in and out of the wall.
(1976)
LUCILLE CLIFTON (BORN 1936)
to a dark moses
You are the one
I am lit for.
Come with your rod
that twists
and is a serpent.
I am the bush.
I am burning
I am not consumed.
(1974)
FREDERICK SEIDEL (BORN 1936)
Heart Art
A man is masturbating his heart out,
Swinging in the hammock of the Internet.
He rocks back and forth, his cursor points
And selects. He swings between repetitive extremes
Among the come-ons in the chat rooms.
But finally he clicks on one
World Wide Web woman who cares.
Each of her virtual hairs
Brings him to his knees.
Each of her breasts
Projects like a sneeze.
He hears her dawning toward him as he reads her dimensions,
Waves sailing the seas of cyberspace—
Information, zeros-and-ones, whitecaps of.
Caught in a tangle of Internet,
Swinging in the mesh to sleep,
Rocking himself awake, sailing the virtual seas,
A man travels through space to someone inside
An active matrix screen. Snow falls.
A field of wildflowers blooms. Night falls.
Day resumes.
This is the story about humans taking over
The country. New York is outside
His study while he works. Paris is outside.
Outside the window is Bologna.
He logs on. He gets up.
He sits down. A car alarm goes off
Yoi yoi yoi yoi and yips as it suddenly stops.
Man has the takeover impact
Of an asteroid—throwing up debris, blotting out the sun—
Causing the sudden mass extinction
Of the small bookstore
At the millennium. The blood from the blast cakes
And forms the planet’s new crust:
A hacker in Kinshasa getting it on with one in Nome.
Their
poems start
With the part about masturbating the heart—
Saber cuts whacking a heart into tartare—
Heart art worldwide,
Meaning that even in the Far East the subject is love.
Here in the eastern United States,
A man is masturbating his art out.
An Ice Age that acts hot
Only because of the greenhouse effect
Is the sort of personality.
Beneath the dome of depleted ozone, they stay cold.
Mastodons are mating on the Internet
Over the bones of dinosaur nuclear arms,
Mating with their hands.
(1998)
MARGE PIERCY (BORN 1936)
Salt in the Afternoon
The room is a conch shell
and echoing in it, the blood
rushes in the ears,
the surf of desire sliding in
on the warm beach.
The room is the shell of the moon
snail, gorgeous predator
whose shell winds round and round
the color of moonshine
on your pumping back.
The bed is a slipper shell
on which we rock, opaline
and pearled with light sweat,
two great deep currents
colliding into white water.
The clam shell opens.
The oyster is eaten.
The squid shoots its white ink.
Now there is nothing but warm
salt puddles on the flats.
(1992)
C. K. WILLIAMS (BORN 1936)
Ethics
The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in love with someone
else’s wife,
I managed to maintain the clearest sense of innocence, even after the
woman returned my love,
even after she’d left her husband and come down on the plane from
Montreal to be with me,
I still felt I’d done nothing immoral, that whole disturbing category had
somehow been effaced;
even after she’d arrived and we’d gone home and gone to bed, and even
after, the next morning,
when she crossed my room undressed—I almost looked away; we were
both as shy as adolescents—
and all that next day when we walked, made love again, then slept, clinging to each other,
even then, her sleeping hand softly on my chest, her gentle breath gently
moving on my cheek,
even then, or not until then, not until the new day touched upon us, and
I knew, knew absolutely,
that though we might love each other, something in her had to have the
husband, too,
and though she’d tried, and would keep trying to overcome herself, I
couldn’t wait for her,
did that perfect guiltlessness, that sure conviction of my inviolable virtue,
flee me,
to leave me with a blade of loathing for myself, a disgust with who I
guessed by now I was,
but even then, when I took her to the airport and she started up that corridor the other way,
and we waved, just waved—anybody watching would have thought that
we were separating friends—
even then, one part of my identity kept claiming its integrity, its non-
involvement, even chastity,
which is what I castigate myself again for now, not the husband or his
pain, which he survived,
nor the wife’s temptation, but the thrill of evil that I’d felt, then kept
myself from feeling.
(1992)
CHARLES SIMIC (BORN 1938)
Breasts
I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.
They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.
Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher’s stone
Worth bothering about.
They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.
Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.
They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.
I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.
Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer mugs.
I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Star-gazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth…
They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.
And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg-yolk.
I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,
That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.
O my sweet yes, my sweet no,
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the absolute immobility
Of time, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,
I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.
(1974)
BILLY COLLINS (BORN 1941)
Pinup
The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
that you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
the mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,
and as you look closer you notice that this month’s
is not the one pushing the lawn mower, wearing
a straw hat and very short blue shorts,
her shirt tied in a knot just below her breasts.
Nor is it the one in the admiral’s cap, bending
forward, resting her hands on a wharf piling,
glancing over the tiny anchors on her shoulders.
No, this is March, the month of great winds,
so appropriately it is the one walking her dog
along a city sidewalk on a very blustery day.
One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head
and the other is grasping the little dog’s leash,
so of course there is no hand left to push down
her dress which is billowing up around her waist
exposing her long stockinged legs and yes the secret
apparatus of her garter belt. Needless to say,
in the confusion of wind and excited dog
the leash has wrapped itself around her ankles
several times giving her a rather bridled
and helpless appearance which is added to
by the impossibly high heels she is teetering on.
You would like to come to her rescue,
gather up the little dog in your arms,
untangle the leash, lead her to safety,
and
receive her bottomless gratitude, but
the mechanic is calling you over to look
at something under your car. It seems that he has
run into a problem and the job is going
to cost more than he had said and take
much longer than he had thought.
Well, it can’t be helped, you hear yourself say
as you return to your place by the workbench,
knowing that as soon as the hammering resumes
you will slowly lift the bottom of the calendar
just enough to reveal a glimpse of what
the future holds in store: ah,
the red polka-dot umbrella of April and her
upturned palm extended coyly into the rain.
(1995)
STEPHEN DOBYNS (BORN 1941)
Desire
A woman in my class wrote that she is sick
of men wanting her body and when she reads
her poem out loud the other women all nod
and even some of the men lower their eyes
and look abashed as if ready to unscrew
their cocks and pound down their own dumb heads
with these innocent sausages of flesh, and none
would think of confessing his hunger
or admit how desire can ring like a constant
low note in the brain or grant how the sight
of a beautiful woman can make him groan
on those first spring days when the parkas
have been packed away and the bodies are staring
at the bodies and the eyes stare at the ground;
and there was a man I knew who even at ninety