The Best American Erotic Poems Read online

  In this head the all-baffling brain,

  In it and below it the making of the attributes of heroes.

  Examine these limbs, red black or white—they are very cunning in

  tendon and nerve,

  They shall be stript that you may see them.

  Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,

  Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,

  good-sized arms and legs,

  And wonders within there yet.

  Within there runs his blood, the same old blood, the same red

  running blood,

  There swells and jets his heart—there all passions and desires—all

  reachings and aspirations,

  Do you think they are not there because they are not expressed in

  parlors and lecture-rooms?

  This is not only one man, he is the father of those who shall be fathers

  in their turns,

  In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

  Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and

  enjoyments.

  How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring

  through the centuries?

  Who might you find you have come from yourself if you could trace

  back through the centuries?

  8

  A woman at auction,

  She too is not only herself—she is the teeming mother of mothers,

  She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

  Her daughters or their daughters’ daughters—who knows who shall

  mate with them?

  Who knows through the centuries what heroes may come from them?

  In them and of them natal love—in them the divine mystery—the same

  old beautiful mystery.

  Have you ever loved a woman?

  Your mother—is she living? have you been much with her? and has

  she been much with you?

  Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and

  times all over the earth?

  If life and the soul are sacred the human body is sacred,

  And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,

  And in man or woman a clean strong firm-fibred body is beautiful as

  the most beautiful face.

  Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool

  that corrupted her own live body?

  For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

  Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed,

  Who degrades or defiles the body of the dead is not more cursed.

  9

  O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and

  women, nor the likes of the parts of you;

  I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul,

  (and that they are the soul,)

  I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that

  they are poems,

  Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s,

  father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,

  Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,

  Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or

  sleeping of the lids,

  Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and

  the jaw-hinges,

  Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,

  Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,

  Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the

  ample side-round of the chest,

  Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews,

  arm-bones,

  Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger,

  finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails,

  Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,

  Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone,

  Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round,

  man-balls, man-root,

  Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,

  Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,

  Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel,

  All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body,

  or of any one’s body, male or female,

  The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,

  The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,

  Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,

  Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from

  woman,

  The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping,

  love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,

  The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

  Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

  Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving, and

  tightening,

  The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

  The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,

  The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the

  naked meat of his own body, or another person’s body,

  The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out,

  The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward

  toward the knees,

  The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the

  marrow in the bones,

  The exquisite realization of health,

  O I think now these are not the parts and poems of the body only,

  but of the soul,

  O I think these are the soul!

  (1855–1856)

  GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823–1890)

  from Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love

  If she should give me all I ask of her,

  The virgin treasures of her modest love;

  If lip to lip in eager frenzy clove,

  And limb with limb should palpitate and stir

  In that wild struggle whose delights confer

  A rapture which the jealous gods above

  Envy and long for as they coldly move

  Through votive fumes of spice and burning myrrh;

  Yea, were her beauty thus securely mine,

  Forever waiting at my beck and call,

  I lord and master of her all in all;

  Yet at that weakness I would fret and pine

  Which makes exhausted nature trip and fall

  Just at the point where it becomes divine.

  (1929)

  EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)

  211

  Come slowly—Eden!

  Lips unused to Thee—

  Bashful—sip thy Jessamines—

  As the fainting Bee—

  Reaching late his flower,

  Round her chamber hums—

  Counts his nectars—

  Enters—and is lost in Balms.

  (c. 1860)

  249

  Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

  Were I with thee

  Wild Nights should be

  Our luxury!

  Futile—the Winds—

  To a Heart in port—

  Done with the Compass—

  Done with the Chart!

  Rowing in Eden—

  Ah, the Sea!

  Might I but moor—Tonight—

  In Thee!

  (1861)

  315

  He fumbles at your Soul

  As Players at the Keys

  Before they drop full Music on—

 
He stuns you by degrees—

  Prepares your brittle Nature

  For the Ethereal Blow

  By fainter Hammers—further heard—

  Then nearer—Then so slow

  Your Breath has time to straighten—

  Your Brain—to bubble Cool—

  Deals—One—imperial—Thunderbolt—

  That scalps your naked Soul—

  When Winds take Forests in the Paws—

  The Universe—is still—

  (1862)

  1555

  I groped for him before I knew

  With solemn nameless need

  All other bounty sudden chaff

  For this foreshadowed Food

  Which others taste and spurn and sneer—

  Though I within suppose

  That consecrated it could be

  The only Food that grows

  (c. 1882)

  1670

  In Winter in my Room

  I came upon a Worm—

  Pink, lank and warm—

  But as he was a worm

  And worms presume

  Not quite with him at home—

  Secured him by a string

  To something neighboring

  And went along.

  A Trifle afterward

  A thing occurred

  I’d not believe it if I heard

  But state with creeping blood—

  A snake with mottles rare

  Surveyed my chamber floor

  In feature as the worm before

  But ringed with power—

  The very string with which

  I tied him—too

  When he was mean and new

  That string was there—

  I shrank—“How fair you are”!

  Propitiation’s claw—

  “Afraid,” he hissed

  “Of me”?

  “No cordiality”—

  He fathomed me—

  Then to a Rhythm Slim

  Secreted in his Form

  As Patterns swim

  Projected him.

  That time I flew

  Both eyes his way

  Lest he pursue

  Nor ever ceased to run

  Till in a distant Town

  Towns on from mine

  I set me down

  This was a dream.

  (1914)

  EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887)

  Assurance

  Last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss

  Still floated on my lips. For we had strayed

  Together in my dream, through some dim glade,

  Where the shy moonbeams scarce dared light our bliss.

  The air was dank with dew, between the trees,

  The hidden glow-worms kindled and were spent.

  Cheek pressed to cheek, the cool, the hot night-breeze

  Mingled our hair, our breath, and came and went,

  As sporting with our passion. Low and deep

  Spake in mine ear her voice: “And didst thou dream,

  This could be buried? This could be sleep?

  And love be thrall to death! Nay, whatso seem,

  Have faith, dear heart; this is the thing that is!”

  Thereon I woke, and on my lips her kiss.

  (1980)

  EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)

  Terminus

  Wonderful was the long secret night you gave me, my

  Lover,

  Palm to palm, breast to breast in the gloom. The faint

  red lamp,

  Flushing with magical shadows the common-place room

  of the inn,

  With its dull impersonal furniture, kindled a mystic

  flame

  In the heart of the swinging mirror, the glass that has

  seen

  Faces innumerous & vague of the endless travelling

  automata,

  Whirled down the ways of the world like dust-eddies

  swept through a street,

  Faces indifferent or weary, frowns of impatience or pain,

  Smiles (if such there were ever) like your smile and mine

  when they met

  Here, in this self-same glass, while you helped me to

  loosen my dress,

  And the shadow-mouths melted to one, like sea-birds

  that meet in a wave—

  Such smiles, yes, such smiles the mirror perhaps has

  reflected;

  And the low wide bed, as rutted and worn as a

  high-road,

  The bed with its soot-sodden chintz, the grime of its

  brasses,

  That has borne the weight of fagged bodies, dust-

  stained, averted in sleep,

  The hurried, the restless, the aimless—perchance it has

  also thrilled

  With the pressure of bodies ecstatic, bodies like ours,

  Seeking each other’s souls in the depths of unfathomed

  caresses,

  And through the long windings of passion emerging

  again to the stars…

  Yes, all this through the room, the passive & featureless

  room,

  Must have flowed with the rise & fall of the human

  unceasing current;

  And lying there hushed in your arms, as the waves of

  rapture receded,

  And far down the margin of being we heard the low

  beat of the soul,

  I was glad as I thought of those others, the nameless, the

  many,

  Who perhaps thus had lain and loved for an hour on the

  brink of the world,

  Secret and fast in the heart of the whirlwind of travel,

  The shaking and shrieking of trains, the night-long

  shudder of traffic,

  Thus, like us they have lain & felt, breast to breast in

  the dark,

  The fiery rain of possession descend on their limbs

  while outside

  The black rain of midnight pelted the roof of the

  station;

  And thus some woman like me, waking alone before

  dawn,

  While her lover slept, as I woke & heard the calm stir of

  your breathing,

  Some woman has heard as I heard the farewell shriek of

  the trains

  Crying good-bye to the city & staggering out into

  darkness,

  And shaken at heart has thought: “So must we forth in

  the darkness,

  Sped down the fixed rail of habit by the hand of

  implacable fate—

  So shall we issue to life, & the rain, & the dull dark

  dawning;

  You to the wide flare of cities, with windy garlands and

  shouting,

  Carrying to populous places the freight of holiday

  throngs;

  I, by waste lands, & stretches of low-skied marsh

  To a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town

  moulders & shrinks,

  And its roofs fall in, & the sluggish feet of the hours

  Are printed in grass in its streets; & between the

  featureless houses

  Languid the town-folk glide to stare at the entering

  train,

  The train from which no one descends; till one pale

  evening of winter,

  When it halts on the edge of the town, see, the houses

  have turned into grave-stones,

  The streets are the grassy paths between the low roofs

  of the dead;

  And as the train glides in ghosts stand by the doors of

  the carriages;

  And scarcely the difference is felt—yea, such is the life I

  return to…”

  Thus may another have thought; thus, as I turned may

  have turned

  To the sleeping lips at her side, to drink, as I drank

  there, oblivion….<
br />
  (c. 1909)

  ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

  The Subverted Flower

  She drew back; he was calm;

  “It is this that had the power.”

  And he lashed his open palm

  With the tender-headed flower.

  He smiled for her to smile,

  But she was either blind

  Or willfully unkind.

  He eyed her for a while

  For a woman and a puzzle.

  He flicked and flung the flower,

  And another sort of smile

  Caught up like finger tips

  The corners of his lips

  And cracked his ragged muzzle.

  She was standing to the waist

  In goldenrod and brake,

  Her shining hair displaced.

  He stretched her either arm

  As if she made it ache

  To clasp her—not to harm;

  As if he could not spare

  To touch her neck and hair.

  “If this has come to us

  And not to me alone—”

  So she thought she heard him say;

  Though with every word he spoke

  His lips were sucked and blown

  And the effort made him choke

  Like a tiger at a bone.

  She had to lean away.

  She dared not stir a foot,

  Lest movement should provoke

  The demon of pursuit

  That slumbers in a brute.

  It was then her mother’s call

  From inside the garden wall

  Made her steal a look of fear

  To see if he could hear

  And would pounce to end it all

  Before her mother came.

  She looked and saw the shame:

  A hand hung like a paw,

  An arm worked like a saw

  As if to be persuasive,

  An ingratiating laugh

  That cut the snout in half,

  An eye become evasive.

  A girl could only see

  That a flower had marred a man,

  But what she could not see

  Was that the flower might be

  Other than base and fetid:

  That the flower had done but part,