I: A Letter to My Mother

Yes, I have quite often
made furtive love.
We all did, didn't we, when
we were young?
I felt the blaze of lust
give my body
a potency
beyond
all doubt.
But something colder used
my youth
and would not let
pleasure out.

We are the dead.
We communicate
by lying still
head to hand to head.

(I stood on the balcony
of my apartment
leaning on the rail
gazing at the park below.
You lay on the bed behind me
soft at last with sleep.
Inside me
it was as though
I still could feel the glow
of your stiff body,
a dark lustre of satisfaction.
I knew the birth of pleasure
without the endless debt.)

If we are dead,
we can communicate
by lying still
head to hand to head.

I saw a movie once
in which the heroine blunts
the doglike carnality of her lover.
The men were primitive
and entered from the rear,
seeing the multiple inviting cracks
and feeling the hard backs
of women whose fear of rape
mingled with their mutual pleasure.
Piquant? Well, perhaps,
but limited, with little time
for lingering.
Our heroine,
that grand explorer of her
sex, felt some newness stir.
Persuading her lover
(swollen, eager, curious)
to withdraw, she turned
to see his face
and in that intimate space
love was made,
with many private strokes
and some deft fingering.

If (from time to time) we die
from lack of understanding,
the world does not, and can revivify
us, guiding us through sex
to a state that's pure.
For some few necessary moments,
Mother,
at least that's sure.