Monday, February 16, 2004

POEM OF THE DAY Vegetable Love   Let me taste the rain cupped in the fluted bowl of orchid.   Let me lick the sweat from the back of the jewel eyed tree toad.   Let me suck the succulent grub from its curled leaf.   Let the honey ants I keep in my mustache drink at their River Jordan, the trickle of your salt sap.   Let my prickly chin buff to a high gloss the mahogany and teak of your inner thighs.   Let this monkey face cling to his daily rest in your hanging gardens, my Amazonia.   Let this tongue take you like the bite of a thorn-tipped arrow down the long fall to limp numbness all the bones of your pelvis broken to pleasure.   Then upward our “vegetable love will grow vaster than empires and more slow”   until the earth is again covered with primordial forest, and in sex we fly from the sudden trapeze of our joined hips into the green canopy high above ground.   Dana Pattillo, 1990 Note: This poem helped me seduce a married woman.  A rival poet who went by the moniker "Henry Alarmclock" derisively refered to yours truly as the "vagina poet" at an open reading one evening.  When my turn at the mike came, I asked the audience: "Which would you rather wake up to in the morning, an alarmclock...or a warm vagina?"  The vagina won by acclamation. I miss the bad old days sometimes. The imbedded quote is from Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. PoD 86 12:23:08 PM    comment []