YET ANOTHER POETRY READING
Sex is like a glass of water.
——Alexandra Kollantai
—for Bruce Isaacson
You know it happens each time I read poems
about sex & death in the afternoon.
One poet or another wants to follow me down
the smooth truncated saplings of bar stools,
& small infields of hallways & closets—
Call me on the carpet saying, You need a good man.
It's been 6 months & at the erotic poetry ball
the last barbarian in black leather
& studs sweet-talking me in Spanish
tangles up the night in my blue silk dress,
saying, I know you. Verdad?
We neck a bottle of chardonnay & steam up the sunroof.
Not quite unrequited lust in the cab of a pick-up.
Who's keeping score? You get to second base,
I steal third but home is an illusion.
Where does Einstein sleep? We confess
our tongues collude at the speed of recovery. Besos del mar.
When you let down my hair, tuberoses, primordial
star-scented edens fall beneath your knee
giving up their bounty all at once——both acrid & bitter.
There is a fine line of distinction between perfume,
the sweet smell of decay & desire deep in the jungle.
Statistics change with each cycle;
we continue to make love in the mirror
of each other's eyes but I've prepared for this by eating
Russian chocolate in late afternoon.
My girlfriend's pissed, waiting out in the cold
for us to stop all this sexual innuendo
so we can go home saying, You straight women are all alike.
Men come first. Says you're trouble with a capital “T.”
She's right. I want to ride you across wheat fields
of midsummer Russian steppes,
Tchaikovsky's violin concerto
plying more than sum totals of notes or words.
You want to follow me. Down the road, headlights
never abandon us though we travel at a snail's pace—
breaking speed limits tho not the speed of light.
If sex is death, let me die a little in your arms again
because death is dressed in violets, the color of mourning
but I've said this somewhere before in a poem
to another man. Where does consumation begin
or conception or addiction? If it weren't so late
in the season we could listen to the rain on my roof
but the tiny dog-faced violets know the direction of dawn
without knowing the concept of east or death or spring
training. In the ball courts of Chichen Itza,
the gods wait for the climactic ending; both teams
lose their heads but I lose your address.
Poets are cheap. We will do anything for a good line.
More than once I've caught our names coupling in print.
It's beginning to look suspicious
& we're always the last to know.
Tomorrow we will wake up pretending it was a dream
but our words unzip the secrets of the universe
& we come down so hard
even the Milky Way screams, Galactos.
If you look closely, you can still see the old moon
on the sidelines coaching the new moon to steal home,
saying, Slide, slide. The bases are loaded.
It's an easy victory.
4/9/89
Sex is like a glass of water.
——Alexandra Kollantai
—for Bruce Isaacson
You know it happens each time I read poems
about sex & death in the afternoon.
One poet or another wants to follow me down
the smooth truncated saplings of bar stools,
& small infields of hallways & closets—
Call me on the carpet saying, You need a good man.
It's been 6 months & at the erotic poetry ball
the last barbarian in black leather
& studs sweet-talking me in Spanish
tangles up the night in my blue silk dress,
saying, I know you. Verdad?
We neck a bottle of chardonnay & steam up the sunroof.
Not quite unrequited lust in the cab of a pick-up.
Who's keeping score? You get to second base,
I steal third but home is an illusion.
Where does Einstein sleep? We confess
our tongues collude at the speed of recovery. Besos del mar.
When you let down my hair, tuberoses, primordial
star-scented edens fall beneath your knee
giving up their bounty all at once——both acrid & bitter.
There is a fine line of distinction between perfume,
the sweet smell of decay & desire deep in the jungle.
Statistics change with each cycle;
we continue to make love in the mirror
of each other's eyes but I've prepared for this by eating
Russian chocolate in late afternoon.
My girlfriend's pissed, waiting out in the cold
for us to stop all this sexual innuendo
so we can go home saying, You straight women are all alike.
Men come first. Says you're trouble with a capital “T.”
She's right. I want to ride you across wheat fields
of midsummer Russian steppes,
Tchaikovsky's violin concerto
plying more than sum totals of notes or words.
You want to follow me. Down the road, headlights
never abandon us though we travel at a snail's pace—
breaking speed limits tho not the speed of light.
If sex is death, let me die a little in your arms again
because death is dressed in violets, the color of mourning
but I've said this somewhere before in a poem
to another man. Where does consumation begin
or conception or addiction? If it weren't so late
in the season we could listen to the rain on my roof
but the tiny dog-faced violets know the direction of dawn
without knowing the concept of east or death or spring
training. In the ball courts of Chichen Itza,
the gods wait for the climactic ending; both teams
lose their heads but I lose your address.
Poets are cheap. We will do anything for a good line.
More than once I've caught our names coupling in print.
It's beginning to look suspicious
& we're always the last to know.
Tomorrow we will wake up pretending it was a dream
but our words unzip the secrets of the universe
& we come down so hard
even the Milky Way screams, Galactos.
If you look closely, you can still see the old moon
on the sidelines coaching the new moon to steal home,
saying, Slide, slide. The bases are loaded.
It's an easy victory.
4/9/89
