ELK
The man who said he could smell the girls ovulating
in the hallways was a poet, and the comment
offered years after the fact did not apply specifically
to my body, though I carried my bloody basket of eggs
under the window out which he had glanced
as he wrote lines that had sway at the time. I still have
the window, the comment, his occupation,
the fact that he was a white man, sometimes given
to cheating on his wife; I still have his hand
brushing up as he speaks over a meal or cocktail,
a mustache he twirls as he speaks, or a silky
bright vest he thumbs. But I no longer have the fact
of his name. Some of the possibilities are dead now,
some alive and gravely ill. Scraps of their poems
live in the windy archive of my recall crumbling
and reassembling themselves into a single song
of a time when women were poised to become
slightly more lucky for a while, the very fact
of ovulation having so recently become a force
we could control, though the pills
were too powerful, and the halls to which the poet
referred were churning with the hormonal tea
that made us thick and nauseous as perpetually
gravid beasts while we tried to master
the great books without the distraction of stray
testosterone. The witty comment itself now churns in me
like the cocktail of synthetic hormones that inspired it,
falling in the trove of such witticisms escaped
from multiples of this clever fellow whose words
I hung on, this well meaning tutor without whom
I might have fallen back into the soup of biological
imperative, that sticky stream of ordinary women
dousing an English department in their cloud,
that herd goaded by the brutal urgencies
of fear and feed.
RUE MOUFFETARD
Most naked bodies are unspeakably sad
in the bland light of day, and photos
of wholes or parts, more like the dead
than the dead, gristled slabs laid out
on market carts to dizzy flies
and aproned matrons looking for liver
for their cats. Someone loved the face
itself, quite apart from the rest,
best as terrain raised on a map
the hands travel alone and always
without haste. She was right,
my young mother, who urged the lace
on my nuptial night: who desires
what the eye has already claimed?
And did he have a name for the member
about which we could laugh? If so,
it’s thankfully lost, as are the camera’s swipes
we never made. Someone once alleged
that sexual pleasure was more than half
the product of a good imagination,
and yes, what the mind could supply
was always what took the forlorn
out of “fornicate,” saved the newlyweds
from spoil, and left only the boar’s fixed
smile coaxed from emulsions, whatever crude
joke the vendor muttered in French
mercifully lost too. Even when they parted,
there was nothing for custody to command.
Neither had given birth to the comedy
of graphic captures, the laughable trace
of spoiled human self regard congealing
on enameled racks and rolled beneath the festive
awnings once the loin’s been sold.
