In the garden God had power, the garden had power,
and Adam had full power over Eve.
It was Eve who went out of line and disobeyed the garden, Adam,
and God.
To get into heaven, he suggests, women should obey.
Preferably in a garden.
Stand up, he tells her.
She stands.
She thinks they're getting ready to leave.
He stands up behind her and puts his hands on her shoulder,
he unzips the top of her dress and unhooks her bra.
Turn around, he tells her.
She does.
He pulls on the sleeves of a dress exposing her bra.
He puts his hand over her breast and takes her bra off
with the back of his hands.
Her dress hangs at her hips.
Some clothes do an element of intrigue, he agrees.
You ever done anything like this before, he asks?
She shakes her head.
It's all right, he promises.
I've been blessed.
Any part of me that touches you would be blessed too.
The saliva in my mouth is like holy water.
To prove it, he bends down to put his tongue on her breast.
Now your breast is saved.
He smiles.
And then things take another turn.
I become the he.
He presses his tongue against her other breast,
puts his whole mouth around it.
She startles.
Here's the tricky part, I tell her,
as I push down on her shoulders to get
her to kneel with one hand on the top of her head,
and when I'm doing the buckle and button of my jeans,
I try to explain.
First I must be made unclean by a mouth
that makes promises it doesn't keep.
Then, I have to be re-cleansed.
Where am I?
I am both the man and the woman, the predator and the prey,
the top and the bottom.
I pull my penis out from my underwear and put the tip of it
on her mouth.
I nudge it between her lips to get me to open them,
but she keeps them closed.
She is me.
I keep them closed, but the pressure against my lip
makes my mouth water.
Come now, he says.
It won't hurt.
Open up, you like apples so much.
I open my mouth a little.
He says, wider.
I taste something mucousy and salty on my tongue.
The taste makes me open wider.
Keep your teeth behind your lips.
I push deeper toward the back of her throat.
I almost gag, but I take control.
I master my cheek, my throat muscles and push him back.
They fight in her mouth and take it in her mouth
until he stops and says, wait, I'm too close.
I tell her to lie down.
I press what is left of her dress up,
so now it's all bunched her hips.
You're so sweet.
You smell so sweet.
She didn't expect nice words.
She wonders if salt comes with sweet.
I soon learn the answer because he's nudging down my underwear.
I press my legs together, which makes
him pull my panties harder.
Come on, he says again.
I can tell you like this.
We're almost there.
Naked, back to the way things should be.
I screwed the rest of her dress off
and she lies there with the cool breeze running over her.
I am cold, cold enough to arch up toward his warmth.
This is wrong, this arching.
He did not tell me to arch.
I am not clean.
I am not fruit.
I am reaching.
This is no longer his game.
I have to cleanse you.
I think you'll like it, he says.
He puts his hand on the mound of my pubes.
Just open your legs a little.
His hand cups me like it could lift me up,
like it could make me a world unto myself,
turn me into an apple.
Where his hand is, finger against wet, fat flesh
makes me obey.
I press my whole hand against my vagina,
like I'm cupping it to keep my hand warm.
Then I tickle me with my index finger.
Her legs spread open far further.
In little circles, his finger moves inside her.
I put my hand on his stomach.
It is the safest place.
I put my hand on her stomach.
I know she can't resist the promise.
His face bends down to where his hand is.
He follows the movement of his finger with his tongue,
almost clean he mumbles.
I rise up to meet me.
My seemingly gigantic penis throbbing on my stomach
for a moment.
Then I rock back and place the tip where his tongue was.
Now, he says, my own spit will clean me.
He presses the tip of his penis into me,
then moves it up and down.
I'll go slow, but this may hurt a bit.
So if you really are clean now, say, Oh, when it feels good.
It takes a minute, but I say, Oh, before I do.
We want always to be the actors.
The noun in the sentence, the dam builders,
the deer herd thinners, the jailers.
But their nature is outside our control, even inside our own.
It's all about proximity, nature, and power too.
And all of the old cliches about women, and youth,
and pretend accident.
Women want to be forced, they're seduced, semantics,
younger is better.
Prone to accident, whoops, his penis just fell into me.
It's virginal to place the blame on others,
to be the direct object to some man's hard noun.
When something is done to you, how
can you be accused of choosing or even conspiring?
When Erik and I start telling people
that this baby is a girl, they all
sympathize with Erik about the chastity belts,
and the midriff showing shirts, and the guns in the closet
to threaten the boys bringing the girls home from dates.
And dad out of the car knocking on the window saying,
get my daughter in the house right now.
Boys are the culprits.
The girls are the victim.
We engraved its syllogism so deeply,
we don't even allow, even in our fantasies,
the girl to be on top.
To be the lecherous teacher.
Our minds correct all the images of the girl
making the boy bend over.
If we can always count on direction.
This leads that, boys fuck girls,
that our fantasy separate out from our actual sexual lives.
But there's a subversive element to these fantasies
that plays out in real life.
We ask the predator child molester
to do even more than keep his fantasies separate.
We want his erased, but that's as
simple as asking the direct object
to be the nominative noun.
That's as simple as asking the cow
to start chomping on the wolf.
One of the darker fantasies, the one
where the girl's pubic hair is soft
down instead of wiring curls.
One where the baby's fingers wiggle so delicately
and slide the slippery vaginal darkness.
One where the boy's penis fits so wholly inside the mouth,
and the one where the girl's mouth fills so fully with
the man's.
No one.
Not the writers of Law and Order:
Special Victims, or the men of NAMBLA,
or the molestation novels of Dorothy Alice, ambassador
to Carolina would fall on her knees.
No one admits to getting in the head of the fucker.
But in a world where we want our actors
to have volition, to choose to lure the 10-year-old over
with the newest video game,
to choose to eat the domesticated off-limits lamb,
instead of up-for-grabs deer.
It's we who have a hard time distinguishing
between natural fantasy, and the fantasy of the natural.
The lamb walks alongside the ewe.
The ewe packs its woolen coat tightly against the ewe
to its left and the ewe to its right.
Their heads bob in unison as they head down the grassy hill
into the flat land of sparsely wooded aspens.
Aspens divide the sheep.
The aspens make a reverse loom.
Instead of finishing the white rug,
the trees unwove the rug of sheep,
separating lamb from ewe.
Perhaps that the lamb had been kept tight knit, tight next
to its mother.
Perhaps the lamb had practiced keeping its eye out, imagining
predation.
All it takes is one aspen to drop the stitch,
to flick the lamb out of the weave
and into the plane, dirt-filled tree dark world.
As the wolves bite down, the lamb lifts its neck.
Does the lamb fault himself for his short legs, his slow speed,
the failure to heel to its mother.
As you blame the tree, the bell, the shepherd, his mother
for turning him to prey, or does he
blame the wolf, who was only waiting.
If you look at it in certain ways,
I come from a family of female victims.
Women who are impregnated when they
are 15 by elementary school janitors across the street,
left by husbands when they are eight months pregnant.
Widowed at 50 by mean drunks, molested by uncles,
diddled by cousins, sold for a night for a bag of marijuana,
hit by husbands, raped in a bathroom,
molested by neighbors, sent for abortions,
forced to give birth to children they couldn't keep at 16.
Men from this perspective may not seem bad in general,
but seem bad in particular.
You can see where there may be a hint of fear
and these women sweat when men come around.
Where there may be a looking up as if the sky or the cloud
may save them.
Why there's a quiet impatience to find a way back
into the herd, into the weave, muddled, and milky, and plain.
But from another perspective, this victimhood
has its own power.
The damsel in distress, the flocking
to save, the measures we will take
to protect something happening to our babies.
To think-- and it has to stop with me--
to check the database.
To choose a neighbor dependent.
To buy a gun, to raise a gun, to look at our front door
as the barrier between good and evil.
To say that we've done a good job keeping danger at bay.
As far at bay as we draw our borders.
To be able to say, I can tell the difference
between predator and suitor, between wolf and dog.
But for each line that we draw, we compose a new nature.
Whenever humans impact nature whether on psyches,
like pedophiles creating new pedophiles,
or changing habitat, or changing the food chain--
we establish new borders, new dams,
new ways for the water to flow.
In this nature we think we can keep in check.
We can't keep nature, the thing we do to things.
We can follow, and trace, and move, and act.
We're always trying to be the noun in the sentence,
avoid being the direct object.
Don't let things be done to you.
And as we do all that doing, all that making and harvesting,
all the procreating and fence building-- someone or something
is being changed.
As the doer, you pretend you can control the change.
Change is natural.
Nature, both human and wild responds
to change with equilibrium.
The change that happens to what you do to nature
is what happens to the nature in you.
The more we try to keep the wild outside,
the more the wild seems to creep in, fiercer, and divided,
and former.
When the neighbor came over to the garage sale,
he told me about his daughter.
She is 22 and has breast cancer.
I wonder if she is the female slash minor in question.
His wife, who I can see from the front porch,
he told me he has blood clots.
They're moving.
I don't ask why.
I imagine someone complained to the landlord
and the landlord didn't want the stink of impure rent
contaminating his wallet.
The day they moved out, which is him carrying box after box.
His wife with the blood clots couldn't lift anything.
They packed their RAV4 and their Pathfinder
to the respective roofs.
I didn't offer to help, but I did watch from my window.
I felt sorry for them.
I hoped they would find a new place to live.
The wolves haven't entered Utah yet.
I want to warn the wolves, stay in Idaho.
Stay in Wyoming, where the populations are lower,
so the mobilization against you will be quieter.
I wish you could come here and make the forest where the boy
scouts get lost, where the campers get hit by lightning,
or climbers fall and river runners drown.
Wild again, wilder than they are.
But the humans are everywhere and they are all armed.
The cows and the sheep mill around even on the road.
The cows aren't armed with anything but size.
Sometimes cars run into them and the drivers die.
But then, sometimes the cows die too.
I keep the fantasies, as natural and perverted
though they may be.
The one about the wolf roaming the Rockies,
and the one about the boy and the girl making out
in the car pulled to the side of the road
still stumble in my head like rocks in a polisher.
It's natural to fantasize, even unnatural and impossible
fantasies.
Sands shift, things that were once
white cliffs of sand turned to stone figurines.
Sometimes fantasies come true.
Sometimes you stop pretending if you control either
the fantasies, or the sand.
Sometimes you just mark, this happened, and then this.
As we call the lines in the sand limestone,
soapstone, sandstone-- each colorful variant of the other.
Maybe you draw the line just asking right or wrong, fantasy
or reality, wolf or dog.
Just bringing them together and looking at them in contrast
might be enough to make the distinctions clear.
Or maybe it's in what you name things.
Dog, fantasy.
When Zoe was born, we named her Zoe, which means life.
Whether natural or fantastical, that seemed like a good place
to start.
Thank you.