I'll read another serious one.
This is a poem--
I have a wonderful poetic friendship with the poet Marie
Howe.
And one of those friendships where
there don't seem to be any barriers,
or if you encounter them, you just keep going through them.
And you say it makes me nervous.
And one of the things we talked about
is about male violence to women and how strong
it is in our culture and how strong it is in us.
And it's a subject that we haven't
seen written about very much, because, of course,
it's so dangerous and that hatred
that is connected in some weird circuitous way to violence
and mothers and the whole fucking mess.
And anyway this is my attempt to write a poem about that subject,
and it's called Adam and Eve.
It's a poem I'm kind still working on.
I wanted to punch her right in the face, and that's the truth.
After all, we'd gotten from the station
of the flickering glances to the station of the hungry mouths,
from the shoreline of shirts and faded jeans
to the ocean of unencumbered skin, from the perilous
mountaintop of the apartment steps
to the sanctified valley of the bed.
The candle flickering on the dresser top,
its little yellow blade sending up its whiff of waxy smoke,
and I could smell her readiness like a dank
cloud poised above a field.
When at the crucial moment, the all important moment, the moment
standing at attention, she held her milk white hand agitated
leap over the entrance to her body and said no,
and my brain burst into flame.
If I couldn't sink myself into her like a dark spur
or dissolve into her like a dirt clod thrown in a river,
can I go all the way in the same and say
I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Am I allowed to say that that I wanted to punch
her right in her soft face?
Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness, just
another way of doing what I wanted then by saying it?
Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?
Is the name of the animal power?
Is it true the man wishes to see the woman hurt
with her own pleasure, and the woman wishes
to see the expression on the man's face of someone falling
from great height, that the woman thrills
with the power of her weakness, and the man is astonished
by the weakness of his power?
Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside
drags the human down into a jungle made of vowels,
hormonal undergrowth, sweat, and hair,
or is this an obsolete idea lodged
like a fossil in the brain of the ape who
lives inside the man?
Can the fossil be surgically removed
or dissolved or redesigned so the man can
be a human being like a woman?
Does the woman see the man as a house
where she might live in safety, and does the man
see the woman as a door through which he might escape the hated
prison of himself?
And when the door is locked, does he hate the door instead?
Does he learn to hate all doors?
I've seen rain turn into snow then back to rain,
and I've seen making love turn into fucking then back
to making love.
And no one covered up their faces out of shame.
No one rose and walked into the lonely mall of night,
but where was there in fact to go?
Oh, be careful people.
Mustn't we be careful?
Shouldn't we tiptoe everywhere we go
and carefully replay each word before it leaves the lips
so that nobody gets hurt?
Are some things better left unsaid?
Have you noticed I haven't got back to the woman?
Should I tell you her name?
Can I say it again that I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Naked and wrong in a strange bed far from home
you could find out something you would rather not have learned.
Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.
[APPLAUSE]