I'm going to take off my John Irving autograph model sport
coat.
He borrowed this for the "Time" magazine cover.
There are three long poems in this book.
By long, I mean 100 lines.
They're each divided into four sections.
I'm going to read two of them tonight.
And I'm going to read one of them now.
I'll just pause between the sections.
"Sex" is the title of the poem.
"Sex"
After Earth finally touches the sun,
and the long explosion stops suddenly like a heart run down,
the world might seem white and quiet
to something that watches it in the sky all night,
so something feels small and feels nearly human pain.
But it won't happen again, the long nights wasted alone,
what's done in doorways in the dark by the young,
and what could have been for some.
Think of all the lovers and the friends!
And in the middle of everything, a man
still turns to himself as to a wall,
leaning completely into a stiff, rough wall.
Sex eased through everyone, even when slipping into middle age
as into a lover's skin, and prying out again
to find the body slumped with flesh, muscles gone,
and bones readied for the turn to dust.
Then no one minds when one lover holds another,
like an unloaded sack.
But the truth enters at the end of life.
It enters like oxygen into every cell and the madness
it feeds there in some is only a lucid metaphor for something
long burned to nothing, like a star.
No one gets over his desire.
No one hurries out of each desire like ponderous clothes,
one at a time, until what's underneath is known.
We knew genitals as small things and we
were ashamed they led us around, even if the hill where we'd
lie down was the same hill the universe unfolded
upon all night.
Watching the stars when, for once, our breathing
seemed to blend.
Each time, from that sweet pressure of hands,
or the great relief of the mouth,
a person can be led out of himself.
Isn't it lonely in the body?
The myth says we ooze about as spirit
until there's a body made to take us,
and only flesh is created by sex.
That's why we enter sex so relentlessly,
toward the pleasure that comes when we push down far
enough to nudge the spirit rising to release,
and the pleasure is pleasure of pure spirit,
for a moment all together again.
So sex returns us to beginning, and we moan.
It's not over yet.
Let us know.
I will.
I'll go like this, OK?
That's from a WC Fields movie, by the way.
Og Ogglesby walks into the bank and he says, do this
if you don't recognize me.
Pure sex becomes specific and concrete
in a caress of breast or slope of waist.
It flies through itself like light,
it sails on nothing like a wing, when
someone's there to be touched, when there's nothing wrong.
So the actual is touched in sex, like a breast through cloth,
the actual rising plump and real, the mind darting about it
like a tongue.
This is where I wanted to be all along, up in the world,
in touch with myself.
Sex, invisible priestess of a good God, I think without you
I might just spin off.
I know there's no keeping you close,
as you flick by underneath a sentence on a train,
or transform the last thought of an old nun,
or withdraw for one moment alone.
Who tells you what to do or ties you down!
I'd give up the rest to suck your dark lips.
I'd give up the rest to fix you, exact in the universe,
at the wildest edge, where there's no such thing as shape.
What a shame I am, if reaching the right woman in a dim room,
pure sex holds itself apart from us
like an angel in an afterlife, and, with the ideas no one
has even dreamed, it wails its odd music for pure mind.
After there's nothing, after the big blow-up
of the whole shebang, what voice from what throat
will tell me who I am?
Each throat on which I would have quietly set my lips
will be ripped like a cheap sleeve
or blown apart like the stopped-up barrel of a gun.
What was inside them all the time I wanted always
to rest my mouth upon?
I thought most everything stuck dartlike
in the half-dome of my brain, and hung there
like fake stars in a planetarium.
It's true that things there changed into names,
that even the people I loved were a bunch of signs,
so I felt most often alone.
This is simply the way we live and nothing to bemoan.
We know it the first time we extend an arm,
the body reaches so far for so long.
We grow and love to grow, then stop, then lie down.
I wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome.
I wanted to know if it made sex happen,
does it show up equally in touch and talk?
Does it leak from the mind as heat from the skin?
I wanted my touching intelligent,
like a beautiful song.