The Poetry of Sex (5 page)

I could mention X, locked naked

in the spare room by two so taken

with each other, they no longer needed him,

or Y who, with an erection in either hand,

said she felt like she was skiing,

or Z who woke in a hotel bed in a maze

of shattered champagne glass

between two hazy girls, his wallet light.

Me? I never tried it, though like many

That hot evening, all through our clumsy fuck,

David smiled down from the wall. His ironed hair,

American teeth. Eyes on me, his best girl.

And his fingers didn’t smell of smoke, he didn’t

nudge me onto my back, like you did, grunting

as he unzipped my jeans, complaining

you’re so bony
, and demanding,
Now you do something –

hold it like this.
David took my virginity

in a room scented with white roses, having smoothed

the sheets himself, slotted ‘How Can I be Sure?’

into the tape machine. And when we were done

he didn’t roll off, zip up and slouch downstairs

The first thing they do is embrace.

Fat smiles stay on their faces

all the way to the restaurant.

He eats ribs with sticky, podgy fingers.

She bites chicken wings with shiny lips.

They have a pudding each and share another.

In the car, she tells him about a girl she saw,

with a short, spotted skirt that flapped

around one long limb.

‘There wasn’t even a stump to satisfy me,

just a space where the leg should’ve been.’

‘Was she very pretty?’

‘Yes she was.’

They stop talking and at traffic lights

he strokes her thigh, instead of saying

how sad her story sounds. Quietly, he resents the one-legged girl

for changing the mood between them, resents his wife

for telling him the tale at all.

Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?

He may be dead, and yet he still lies with you

Warming his calloused hands between your thighs.

He may still be alive, and his lips for ever

Puckered on your nipple, above your heart.

I want to think about you in my arms, the way we were

For a while. Then he came out of nowhere to stay.

He was tall, and golden, stripped to the waist, when we sawed

And chopped all autumn the firewood, heaped it

Outside your kitchen door. You were always watching;

You patted him on the back and sniffed the air

Pungent with our sweat, you caught his smell.

That autumn, when I lay with you, you started pretending

These hands of mine were his hands in the dark, these lips

His and the tufts in my armpits his and you inhaled

Hungry, pressed against me, pressed against

A man you were imagining in my place:

Shaping, stretching me to fit your bed; no wonder

When I think of you, as I do, each day and night, I think

Of what you were thinking of, how you watched as I watched you,

How as autumn ended, just before you left

That night, noiseless, away with him for good,

I came upon him at twilight in a clearing.

After the weeks we’d mutely worked together,

Till dark we rested in the deep cool grass without a word.

Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I’m frightened –

I covered her mouth with my own;

she lay in my arms till the storm-window brightened

and stood at our heads like a stone

After months of jaw-jaw, determined that neither

win ground, or be handed the edge,

we gave ourselves up, one to the other

like prisoners over a bridge

I was thrown, you might say, on the mercy

Of her knowledge. Were there less, there’d be plenty:

Undo this, she softly cajoled, no, this.

Miles away, her slant green eyes slid up

To the contingencies of cloud ebbing over the sidings.

When she wrote it there on the subway wall

In an unbookish hand as deep red as Chianti

She dropped, like she dropped her gaze, the r and i –

X marks the spot. Here’s where the mammer’s boy

Lost his viginty.

I thought you’d stop my searching touch

Although you wanted just as much

To have me on this crowded route;

Your denim skirt, my soft dark suit,

But even though we could be seen

I ached to feel myself between

Your legs, to sense the moistness there

For me if I would only dare.

I slid your skirt above your hips,

Your naked neck against my lips

Then eased my hardness into you.

A gasp, a moan, my hardness grew.

A hot afternoon: siesta-time. Exhausted,

    I lay sprawled across my bed.

One window-shutter was closed, the other stood half-open,

    And the light came sifting through

As it does in a wood. It recalled that crepuscular glow at sunset

    Or the trembling moment between darkness and dawn,

Just right for a modest girl whose delicate bashfulness

    Needs some camouflage. And then –

In stole Corinna, long hair tumbled about her

    Soft white throat, a rustle of summer skirts,

Like some fabulous Eastern queen
en route
to her bridal-chamber –

    Or a top-line city call-girl, out on the job.

I tore the dress off her – not that it really hid much,

    But all the same she struggled to keep it on:

Yet her efforts were unconvincing, she seemed half-hearted –

    Inner self-betrayal made her give up.

When at last she stood naked before me, not a stitch of clothing,

    I couldn’t fault her body at any point.

Smooth shoulders, delectable arms (I saw, I touched them),

    Nipples inviting caresses, the flat

Belly outlined beneath that flawless bosom,

    Exquisite curve of a hip, firm youthful thighs.

But why catalogue details? Nothing came short of perfection,

    And I clasped her naked body close to mine.

Fill in the rest for yourselves! Tired at last, we lay sleeping.

    May my siestas often turn out that way!

He was sixteen, she in her forties – the classic older woman

scenario, though her hair was shorter than Anne Bancroft’s

and he wasn’t such a dork as Dustin Hoffman.

They didn’t do it in a hotel but in a garden shed, rusty

sickles, shovels and old model railway bits all around.

A wasp was hitting the buffers on the web-wrought window.

His lack of experience hung off him like a fireman’s uniform

as he stammered, bruised lips when he kissed her and grabbed

for her breasts when she ground their groins together.

She opened her blouse and let him lap the c-cup cornucopia,

her nipples rigid as funnels. It was obvious that squeezing his rod

would bring him juddering to the terminus faster than the Flying Scot.

‘Now we take our time,’ she said, reginal. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ his look

bolder despite the stickiness in his boxers. He stripped them off

and wiped himself, then tapped his rapidly rising tool

against her whiter-than-the-driven-steam knickers.

She pulled aside the gusset and let him in. All aboard!

They rode the Orient Express to Paris, Venice, Istanbul,

cities on fire with carnal pleasure. She shrieked as they entered

the tunnel, pistons thundering and steam cocks fully open.

She arrived first, bucking, nails digging into his coal tender.

He squealed and spurted, head back like a plume of wind-whipped smoke,

then panted in her ear, ‘I love you, Aunt Alice.’ She looked away;

the wasp was tangled in the silken threads, its movements lacking vim,

its screech the desperate braking of a soon-to-be-derailed express.

‘Silly boy,’ she said, reversing. ‘I’ll see you here tomorrow, same time.’

Having deposited, she thought, my underwear in a left luggage locker.

He grinned, wondering where his uncle and cousins were; and would be

the next day. Roger at his office near St Pancras, Lily

and Jez blowing out clouds of skunk in the park?

Sometimes a hand in or of or from the past can make us come

alive again without our realising what it is that’s being done.

And sometimes bodies find their ways from where they each began,

a surprise curving into the present, into the light, under the hand,

and without warning or comment everything on hold has suddenly begun

and now, it seems, this is not as bad as it could possibly have become

and for a while there’s only time and flesh to pass before the rising sun.

And it happens that tonight is a night picked from a hundred and one

other possible nights, each spinning lost between the stars in the silence from

the closing mouths of kisses and answers and the lover’s tongue

to the morning that in the end is well known to always come.