For the Hive
Those were years I told one man after another sure,
I’d fuck a lug like you, why not. I looked down the barrel
of each rifled gaze because I wanted less to be like a woman
who waits than a man who takes as he pleases, enters a bar,
surveys the perennial variety, chooses which one he’ll take
home. No longing; no loneliness allowed: just action.
I screwed inside the frame of a deflated waterbed like a ship-
wrecked coffin. In a forest near Fowl Bay where bent over
a felled oak I heard termites gnaw marrow as a Meditator
quoted Thich Nhat Hanh holding my ass from behind.
One so short I leaned wheelbarrow-low and threw out
my back. A full beard at a pit stop in Manitoba who cited
his trophies and bowling techniques before the white walls
dotted with red tulips bounced to the drunk beat of our bang,
one plush stomach against another. I will never apologize
for lust, I said, to men who asked. To me sex was less sacred
than ponderous, from the verb ponder, meaning to weigh
and, distantly, egg. In time each shag scored was less
a victory over gender than a weird, fragile exchange
in which I was given an egg to hold, or so I imagined,
as if to warm another vulnerability inside mine without
breaking. One yowled he’d never touched a woman,
only men, and when I whispered I didn’t care, he fainted.
I told the firefighter who cried in my arms ecstasy is not
the end; it’s when we go beyond and, for a second, are not
ourselves. He said, sorry, that sex without love was, to him,
the wet burnt smell of a forest days after its been doused.
But what if it isn’t about love after all; what if sex for me
then was a way to give shape to the untailored cloth
of crude truths I witnessed as a kid in a father and others
after? I wasn’t always careful: I dragged outrage feet first
onto the sidewalk after he tried harm. Even his egg has
a name. There were gems, cock-kickers, mopes, punks.
There was fast talker, divorced and with kids who bellowed
Yeats’ “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,”
when I told him the job was done. Then a slew of brooders
like sapphire with their beautiful, busted faces, the lanky one
who sculpted what he called my ruined feet as we lay on
the floor of a rented storefront, leaves blowing through
a mail slot. That was less raunch than letting night seduce
dawn, the warp and weft, woven skin feeling skin on hands
on skin. Later, a poet who leaped over the bed like a flying
squirrel, citing Groucho Marks. Somewhere sloped near
the end of my safari, I grew tired of my body’s hollow mess
when on a bus to Chicago I sat next to Eriks, a painter
who added an “s” to his name for pluralizing purposes.
I was going to an installation on taxidermy, animals
my long-distance lover stuffed and posed before TV sets
he left on static. “Music emanates from the gaze of dead
beasts,” he fretted, “especially horses: because when eyes
can’t shut they don’t lie.” But no one keeps eyes open
during orgasm, I argued, as we humped under a grizzly
he’d nailed to a wooden platform on wheels. We rolled
around the studio, pumping toward our own little deaths,
when his way of looking at me started to make me feel
taxidermic. Eriks listened to the story, frowned, upset not
at the details but the 20 blocks I’d go alone to find this one
he guessed refused to meet me halfway. When we arrived
in Chi-town, he invited me to share a bowl of warm soup
at Bumblebee Diner. As we entered, the place glowed in
that legally blind way––outlaw yellow booths striped black
and white. Eriks asked one question after another, as if
clearing cobwebs from the basement windows of my psyche,
then pointed to a mirage on my arm, an unfinished tattoo
by one who yelped giddy-up! cum time. Eriks didn’t flinch
when I told him what I experienced as a child. He set his
spoon down, and in the time it took our soup to go cold
he wrapped his hands around mine like a canoe and stared
into me. It was hard to brace against his gaze, but the longer
he explored my face the more the fictions I worked so hard
to armor myself with were stripped. There is no escape.
I am as you are, he said, his face turning into broad lowlands,
big sky view. The world cleaved at Bumblebee, and I was
alive. After he walked me where I’d meant to head, he touched
my cheek in a way that transformed me from the inside.
I could hover with you a really long time, he finished, then turned,
leaving me at the door of the one I’d come so far to sleep
with. As he slipped away a cascade of smells and an electric
field of flowers appeared in my mind, a motley of bees
doing their fantastic dance, swarming aster to lavender,
golden rod, sunflower, helicopter-close to stamen, pistil,
and petal. Laden with as much pollen as she can hold,
the worker drones back to the hive, a smudge of truthiness
lost after so much sex with flowers. On her return, chalky
and sweet flavors she swallowed swill into a cocktail she vomits
onto a waxy canvas. She fans her heap dry with furious,
beaten wings till it’s a honeyed, edible shape, then goes on
for the sake of the hive, her life a solitary étude in touch.
