Postcards from the Imagination

The Horticulturist Speaks to her Conceits

I tell you even Eden can’t out-lush
my garden—all you walking flowers, you
are trembling petal flesh. Outstretched, you blush
beneath the most congenial sun. I dig you
out of common ground and put you in
my hothouse. Annual, biennial, perennial—
I drench you all with water from my skin
and watch your buds fall open as I kneel
to catch your scents. I see your pliant stems
bend toward one another, bend toward me
and I am infinitely pleased. You gems,
you, quaking in your beds by twos and threes!

And as for me, my petals are a show,
a bit of quivering color, quid pro quo.

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Call this one an exercise in how to write about an orgiastic fantasy, then hand it in to your creative writing professor for a grade. One of my favorite lit-crit phrases is Seamus Heaney's  "the erotics of composition" (from his introduction to Beowulf). Being turned on by the world is such a beautiful way to begin writing, no?

When I wrote this, I had a minor, completely sexual, and completely unspoken crush on my very-much-older professor--which led me to wonder about the very nature of such fantasies. To a one, almost everyone I've spoken with on the matter admits fantasizing about both people they know and total strangers. But what does that mean? Is it predatory, disrespectful, wrong? Or does fantasizing about another require a sort of generosity of spirit, an ability to romanticize the other, a readiness to see their latent beauty? This poem records some of my initial conclusions on the matter.

All of which I post here because I remain intensely interested in the erotic as an area ripe for creative inquiry. Our mass culture is so damn conflicted about sex, what with the ubiquitous adolescent male fanatasy butting up against those die-hard strains of Puritanism. I have no desire to write traditional erotica, because I want to write about more than just sex. Nor do I find 'clinical' approaches appealling. But if what I have is not quite a vagina, and not quite a cunt, what is it?

(An aside...I was appalled to read the following lines this evening, in Denise Levertov's "Hypocrite Women":  "And if.../ a white sweating bull of a poet told us / our cunts are ugly--why didn't we  / admit we have thought so too? (And / what a shame? They are not for the eye!) // No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy," With all due respect to Ms. Levertov, NO! NO! NO! THEY ARE NOT UGLY!)

How to render the sexual impulse as pure and as worthy of celebration as I believe it to be, without completely desexualizing it (a la the romance novel, which back in 1988 when I secreted it off to a far corner of the public library to read, used ridiculous euphamisms to sanitize body parts), or coming off as idiosyncratically oversexed (read: slutty)--that's the question!

I think the finding the answer probably begins in unflinching honesty.