From the First, the Body Was Dirt

Whose hands touched, first, the head

of the penis, the shaft?

And was it soft

                          or shale?  More rock

than clay.

And who pinched first

into their place the small cups

at the base of the ass?

                                        Who was it

got down there, on whose knees,

and blew—

                         and was that passion

or panic, the machine that drove

those exhalations?

                                        —and how

could we rate the power of that

breath—breeze or gale or a whisper

like the song the little boy sings

to the beetle,

                         whose small legs moved in tune

like his legs, the legs on that first body, must have

moved, if they did move, when

                                                       the dust settled.

In my mind everything’s become enormous.

But was it ever small like that, the first body?

Did it ever sit close to the ants and their piles

of dirt from which that body had come?

You were a small boy once, I suppose.

You were dirty from the start.  

You showed me how to use a cock ring,

and why.

                         How, without ever paying

for a room, to spend two weeks in any city.

How two men could fuck

and continue to face each other

directly

             —took my body and showed me,

my back on a table, my knees by my head.  

Stretched me

                         into seeing you were more than a dog.

You must be dead by now, though I don’t know

whose hands prepared you.

                                                      Whose fingers

fingered, for the final time,

all that dark and kinky hair?

If the first body was made of dirt,

in order to plumb the hollow

of that first throat, whose thumb

first lodged inside the hinge

of that first mouth to force it open?

To make the tongue, so it could work,

who shoved inside that mouth

the shit of a hundred thousand worms?