Eros/Venus/Aphrodite

Anne Sexton is my poetic lover.

The Kiss

My mouth blooms like a cut.I've been wronged all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling cry baby cry baby , you fool!Before today my body was useless.Now it's tearing at its square corners.It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.Zing! A resurrection!Once it was a boat, quite wooden and with no business, no salt water under it and in need of some paint. It was no more than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.She's been elected.My nerves are turned on. I hear them like musical instruments. Where there was silence the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

The Fury of Cocks

There they are drooping over the breakfast plates, angel-like, folding in their sad wing, animal sad, and only the night before there they were playing the banjo. Once more the day's light comes with its immense sun, its mother trucks, its engines of amputation. Whereas last night the cock knew its way home, as stiff as a hammer, battering in with all its awful power. That theater. Today it is tender, a small bird, as soft as a baby's hand. She is the house. He is the steeple. When they fuck they are God. When they break away they are God. When they snore they are God. In the morning thet butter the toast. They don't say much. They are still God. All the cocks of the world are God, blooming, blooming, blooming into the sweet blood of woman.

When man enters woman

When man,
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth with pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashes their rivers.
This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
through God
in His perversity
unties the knot.