Free Love Poetry Out Loud by Robert Alden Rubin Page B

a knife, getting white.
    My hair is the color of chopped maples.
    My eyes dark as beans cooked in the south.
    (Coal fields in the moon on torn-up hills)
    Skin polished as a Ming bowl
    showing its blood cracks, its age, I have hundreds
    of names for the snow, for this, all of them quiet.
    In the night I come to you and it seems a shame
    to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man.
    You recognize strangers,
    think you lived through destruction.
    You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.
    You want to know what I know?
    Your own hands are lying.
    Â 
----
    Realization
    Here’s a hard one. You could read it as a poem from a woman speaking to a man, painting a picture of doubt and recrimination after a loveless coupling in which she was never “there” for him. Or you could read it as a woman’s words to another woman (one who is denying her feelings for the speaker), a call for sexual self-realization. How would you read it?
    Names for the snow =
Eskimos are (incorrectly) thought to have many more names for snow than do other cultures
.
----

7
P LEASURES OF THE F LESH
    â€œWhen a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.”
    â€”Samuel Johnson

----
    ON THE MAT AND IN THE SEA
    The metaphors we use to describe love’s entanglements are as many and varied as … well … the fishes of the sea. So, if you have to ask why a poet might compare lovers to wrestlers or divers, you’re probably too young to be reading this
.
----
    Â 
----
    Victorian-Era Grappling
    The American poet Louisa S. Bevington published her work in the 1880s, a century before the steroid-swollen monsters of pro wrestling showed up on our television sets. So, try to picture the lithe athletes of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery; you’ll enjoy the poem more
.
    Twain! =
Two apart!
----
W ESTLING
    Louisa S. Bevington
    O ur oneness is the wrestlers’, fierce and close.
    Thrusting and thrust;
    One life in dual effort for one prize,—
    We fight, and must;
    For soul with soul does battle evermore
    Till love be trust.
    Our distance is love’s severance; sense divides,
    Each is but each;
    Never the very hidden spirit of thee
    My life doth reach;
    Twain! since we love athwart the gulf that needs
    Kisses and speech.
    Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so
    Than any bliss
    Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one,
    Too near to kiss:
    To be one thought, one voice before we die,—
    Wrestle for this.
W ET
    Marge Piercy
    D esire urges us on deeper
    and farther into the coral maze
    of the body, dense, tropical
    where we cannot tell plant
    from animal, mind from body
    prey from predator, swaying
    magenta, teal, green-golden
    anemones weaving wide open.
    The stronger lusts flash
    corn rows of dagger teeth,
    but the little desires slip,
    sleek frisky neon flowers
    into the corners of the eye.
    The mouth tastes their strange
    sweet and salty blood
    burning the back of the tongue.
    Deeper and deeper into
    the thick warm translucence
    where mind and body melt,
    where we see with our tongues
    and taste with our fingers;
    there the horizon of excess
    folds as we approach
    into plains of not enough.
    Now we are returned to ourselves
    flung out on the beach
    exhausted, flanks heaving
    out of oxygen and time,
    grinning like childish daubs
    of boats. Now it is sleep
    draws us down, surrendered
    to its dark glimmer.
    Â 
----
    In Another Element
    We can lose ourselves in the act of love, an experience where sex becomes otherworldly, transporting, rapturous … Perhaps that’s what leads Marge Piercy to this evocation of reef explorers and the rapture of the deep
.
----
    Â 
----
    [YOUR JOKE HERE]
    Let’s face it: it’s funny. We give it names, we employ dozens of clever euphemisms, we make kicks to the groin a staple of clowning, we mythologize it as the heel of the modern-day Achilles. For Robert Graves, a student of history and myth, it becomes a stand-in for