Day Thirteen

Title: the possible side effect of desire

This may be one of my favorite pieces yet. I started this one at home, of all places. Jim has decided that he is now a painter, too (he says poetry was so last year), and he cleared the Cadillac out of the garage and made himself a nice little painting studio. Since then, he's always asking me to come hang out with him while he paints. My standard response is - hang out and do what? Just hang out, he says.

But I'm not very good at just hanging out, and I usually wander off into some other part of the house where my hands don't sit idle. This makes Jim sad, I realized after we'd had that same conversation several days in a row.

Well last week, he asked me to come hang out with him while he painted. This time I said yes, thinking I'd just sit and keep him company.

So I sat.

Thumb twiddle. Legs crossed, re-cross. Twiddle. Twiddle.

No, I'm not so good at sitting still.

Eventually, I grabbed a canvas and started painting with him. He's been into using tempera paint, so it was fun to experiment with the new media. It's been a long, long while since I used tempera. Much thinner and more easily blend-able than the acrylics I've been working with.

We also had a broken mirror lying around the garage because I seem to have a thing recently for breaking everything glass in our house. So I picked up some shards and started gluing them onto the canvas.

Then this morning, I finally took the canvas into the studio and found a poem line to fit the piece. It was a little tricky. The piece itself has a lot of violence in it, and I wanted to find a line that also had that violence but also had some other dimension.

The line that I settled on comes from To Make a Woman Come, a poem that I had published this spring in Hayden's Ferry Review (woo hoo!). In it, I wanted to explore those moments of sex where our bodies seem to want to be pulled apart. Where pain is a pleasurable sensation. Where something in us is asking to be split completely open.

***

To Make a Woman Come

Dislocate the legs from the hips
and push back gently but firmly.

Delicately remove the fingers, the arms,
one sad joint at a time.
This is the unraveling
of the stomach’s sinewy strands.

Peel away the right breast,
then the left, being careful to
sing or hum as you go.
The smell of discovery
should come fresh and sudden,
like the first cut of an onion.
The stinging that follows
is inevitable, is the
possible side effect of desire.

Press back the head,
the flushed face,
the blue eyes.
Press decisively, with determination,
until the skin glows golden
and the flesh comes softly
off the core of its own accord.