Flickering by Pattiann Rogers

Author:Pattiann Rogers [Rogers, Pattiann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Making Love with the Gods

It’s solely a woman’s pleasure—Leda’s,

Mary’s—to be sought with divine intensity,

to be taken, enveloped, infused

eventually, to give life

to the deity of that moment.

And they come upon one

with such surprise—the god

of wild prairie gardens, for instance,

subtle yet overpowering with his gangly

magenta sorrel, his stiff corn-blue

pokeweed and spiny spring teasel,

all of his smothering tongues probing,

nudging, nibbling at once. Those countless

sun-sucking buds and hard, bristled nips!

What a delirium of green blossoms

to be filled with the wind-razzle

energy of his summer straining

stems and stalks!

And I remember the god of rivers,

all day and all night, as insistent

and swift and fragrant as glacial melt

in high meadows, surging forward,

rumbling bottom boulders, rolling,

tumbling, filled with a balm like weaving

slips of a thousand passing fish,

like the smooth rub of quivering flank

on flank. Wasn’t the entire sky tilted,

spun, carried away by the rippling beauty

of his bronze-silver flesh? Who could resist

the virtuosity of his bluebead lilies lulled

in quiet inlets or the skill of the piercing cave

swallows darting down his canyon corridors?

There must be a sister somewhere

who can recall with me the mastery

of the lord of snow at night, how one

walked out deliberately and stood

alone dressed in red wool in the middle

of the white, unbroken fall of field

and sky, how irresistible it was to lift

one’s naked face and throat to the stings

and caresses of his unrelenting seduction,

to lie down where he wanted, suspended

deep inside that dark drift, to taste,

to drink the clean ice of his higher heavens.

And each time, when one woke afterward,

carrying in the body that same warm,

demanding seed of pulse and pressure

and dogmatic declaration, then no one,

not even envious devils or indifferent

saints, could ever deny or diminish

a love like that.

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