The Mortician's Goddaughter Versed in Lust

Just when I had long outgrown those late-night

seizures in my hand, those involuntary impulses

return to make my fingers twitch like the tips of twigs

after the bird leaps off the branch—

what a crafty little devil, bouncing back all

feathered and ticklish, jittery with pleasure

when it finally finds its nest. The sheets become as damp

as the sweaty shirts that cling to the backs of men

at the dance, and how I pity the girls who

undress their lovers before sex.

When I started loving other bodies instead, allowing other

temporary guests to mold their shapes inside my flesh—

a torso of my arm, a shoulder of my mouth, a waist

or a buttock of my leg—I had no need

to concentrate my rapture to a single sticky place

since every movement in my skin was slowing down

inside the vat of honey I was swimming in.

Oh bath with tongue, oh alchemy of heat and bed.

The memory of so much sex enough to keep me sated

in the quieter evenings of my third and final age.

So imagine my surprise when those possessions

from my adolescence woke me up again, but in the guise

of scribbling from my pen. Not fancy or confession

but something in the middle, like the mole that snuggles

in the space between my breasts, that glorious discovery

that makes the men cry out, the women

shudder with anticipation or intent. It's more like poetry,

because it whistles through the paper like the weekend

afternoons I summoned passersby from behind

the window's curtain. What wonder to seduce with sound,

granting serendipitous fantasy—here a table

with rotating thighs, there a closet panting with exhaustion,

there the eye of the voyeuristic clock bold and

looking to be satisfied with one pair of feet pointing at

two opposite corners of the room,

three fingers always vanishing inside the cluster of

four hands that motion slowly left, slowly right—

the capricious current of the underwater flower,

five limbs comparing lengths and flexibility,

their competition sabotaged by the arrival of a

sixth contender, seven escalating levels in the throat—

whimper, grunt, moan, sigh,

whine, hum, groan, cry—oh, and if we're lucky,

thinks the grinning clock, we will spiral up the scale

(and down again) a good

eight times, nine would be too much to ask,

though not impossible since there was once a

record-breaking tenth, remember?

Eleven minutes for a quickie; at least

twelve positions for a marathon. Now why would I write

a thing like that, me who wears a garter belt to church

on Sundays, my best perfume to market,

where tomatoes look as dazed as the tomato seller?

Blame it on my mother's poor choice for a compadre,

none other than the legendary lover, the mortician,

whom the women always said would have his way

with one, in life or in death—both,

if one was fortunate. And the rumor always was

that he had fathered me, though I never did detect

any resemblance. But what does it matter

anymore? I've outlived even the mortician's crazy

daughter (half-sister, if the hearsay is correct).

If the mortician is my muse, then let him color

every word in ink as dark as pubic hair.

Where to begin? Ah, yes, fittingly, at the little piece

of skin that stimulates imagination:

I'll compose a poem to the mortician's scar.

Source: Black Blossoms (Four Way Books, 2011)