Oh, I'm awfully old-fashioned.
And I believe that there are some words that ladies should
never say under any circumstances
and gentlemen should use only in the laboratory, I guess--
or a lavatory, whichever.
At any rate, there is one word here
that I never used when I was young.
But I hope you'll forgive me.
I think you'll recognize it when it comes up.
This poem is another poem about the dawn,
about the sun coming up.
"Dawn."
In the middle of winter, there may
be men jumping up and down outside their huts
in their flight suits yelling, "Sun, sun, your vagina
smells horrid."
That's the lesson they learn in extremis,
not the farmer who each day smiles idiotically
over his acres of peas just after she comes swooning up
without a word from him to make them
smell sweet; to have his wife dancing in old age,
put them in bottles, and send their sealed sweetness away;
but what the sailor swimming in the bilge out of luck
imagines outside, the insult that keeps him constantly
afloat through a few more strokes;
or what the dog locked in the cellar
when the family went away for the weekend now barks at,
celebrates for a moment, the footsteps-
the footsteps, the busy house on fire above him."