Deft
Though both of my two hands are deft,
I do not want to use the left;
when I between your thighs tonight
slide one, I think I’ll use the right.
Directly as a rocket flies,
your private places I’ll surprise
and then, exploding, plan to enter
not right or left, your deadly center.
Deft as hands will be my heft
when entering your secret cleft,
far smarter than the magic wand
of which you’ve told me you are fond.
Like a rocket I’ll direct
myself towards your hole, erect,
and as soon as I explode,
leave you behind, and take the road.
Inspired by Ali Smith’s article on the lives and poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland in the TLS, January 2,2009 (“Unrhymed Couplet”) .
The quirky, clever, only child of George Townsend Warner, the Harrow historian, Warner lived a full, lively and near-emblematic kind of twentieth-century life; she did munitions work in the First World War, settled down with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland, in the early 1930s as easily as if Ackland were simply any country gentleman, went to Spain a newly declared Communist intellectual in 1937, protested against both Fascism and the Second World War, protested against the Vietnam war, then protested against nuclear proliferation. She and her work spanned three-quarters of a century, but, “because I am too imaginative”, she never wrote an autobiography. “She had the spiritual digestion of a goat”, according to John Updike; Gillian Beer notes how “she composed with an exploratory verve that is quite extraordinary”; “she is so alive that her vital awareness is translated into everything she thinks and does”, wrote her friend, Jean Starr….
“My hand, being deft and delicate, displays / Unerring judgement; cleaves between your thighs / Clean as a ray-directed airplane flies.” The reprint of the complete collection reveals that Ackland’s vision of love is often mechanistic, even rather threatening: “Death, when it stops my heart, / Will slay you too”, she discomfitingly states. But Harman’s careful selection of Warner’s poems from the collection reveals a new erotic concentration in Warner’s own verse: a passionate commitment in the shedding of the objective narrative frame and an intimacy, “sudden, dauntless and shy / As a bird moving in a tree”. For Warner, the collection was clearly a creative act; it seems to have signalled both a release of the self and a commitment to communality, a ghost at home on the earth at last:
Greet finally the earth, greet leaf and root and stock.
Stand in your last hour poised, like the dandelion clock –
Frail ghost of the gaudy raggle-taggle that you were –
Stand up, O homing phantom, stand up intact and declare
The goodness of earth the greatest good you found,
Ere the wind jolts you, and you vanish like the foam.
(“Go the long way, the long way home”)
1/11/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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