Your Feet

Pablo Neruda

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

There’s a breach in your security

I’m inside you finally

My objective: distort your view

Wreck the very core of you

Tantalize, compromise your position

Dismantle your design

Contaminate and deface your convictions

Recreate your state of mind

And when your thoughts have been cleansed and corrected

We’ll celebrate the day

When everything that you were is rejected

That’s when I’ll have my way

Deny me if you think you can

But I always get my man

And before this night is through

I will corrupt you

I’ve had enough of your integrity

Your devotion sickens me

If there’s a fracture in your moral ground

I’ll find the break and I’ll bring you down

And you will swear to a brand new allegiance

Hope to die and cross your heart

You’ll abandon the things you believe in

With total disregard

And as the flag of your past life is burning

We’ll dance around the fire

Swept away by the tides that are turning

You’ll succumb to my desire

Deny me if you think you can

But I always get my man

And before this night is through

I will corrupt you

There’s a breach in your security

And when your thoughts have been cleansed and corrected

We’ll celebrate the day

When everything that you were is rejected

That’s when I’ll have my way

Deny me if you think you can

But I always get my man

And before this night is through

I will corrupt you

______________________________

‘Corrupt’ by Noel Karissa

At the Poetry Reading

John Brehm

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s

wife’s legs—they’re so much more

beautiful than anything he might

be saying, though I’m no longer

in a position really to judge,

having stopped listening some time ago.

He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop

and can therefore get along fine

without my attention. He started in

reading poems about his childhood—

barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,

that sort of stuff—the loss of

innocence he keeps talking about

between poems, which I can relate to,

especially under these circumstances.

Now he’s on to science, a poem

about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying

to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.

Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining

myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,

rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-

stockinged legs, imagining them arched

around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.

My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!

He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,

leaves him for another poet, perhaps,

the observant, uninnocent one, who knows

a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

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What do you think? I’ve been to my fair share of poetry readings, and most times rather than not, they can be quite yawn-inducing.  Yet I collect, read and write poetry.  I think, perhaps, poetry was meant to be read. It is of ink and parchment, and perhaps even kindles and monitors.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’d be looking at the poet’s wife’s legs too.  Wouldn’t you?

_______________________________________________

If you like this poem as much as I do, visit Mr. Brehm’s website HERE.

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Thank you, Pervert Savant, for submitting this lovely piece for our PSO-etry collection. You sure do know how to pick ’em.

xo, Angela

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

________________

Transcendental, verging on divine, don’t you think?  Which is why you never ever ever judge a client by his kink.

 Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
by Billy Collins

First her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything –
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye

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I’ve previously shared some of my favorite Billy Collins poetry with you (both HERE and HERE).  He’s just so damn good and he certainly knows his Emily well, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Or…

… perhaps this account is absolutely true, Mr. Collins having utilized his secretly endowed super power of time travel to journey back to the 1800s where he cornered Ms. Dickinson in some secluded nook of her family’s home and had his way with her.

Makes sense to me.

xo, Angela