Poetry included in After The Fall: Poems Old and New

“Giant Pacific Octopus”

I live with a Giant Pacific Octopus:
he settles himself down beside me on the couch in the evening.
With two arms, he holds a book
that he reads with his single eye:
he wears a pair of glasses over it for reading.

Two more arms go walking over to the sideboard across the room
where the crackers and cheese spread he loves are,
and they send back endless canapés, like a conveyor belt.

While his mouth is drooling and chomping,
another arm comes over and gropes me lightly:
it is like a breeze on my balls, that sweet tentacle.

Other arms start slipping around my body under my clothes,
they wiggle right in, one around my waist,
and all over, and down the crack of my ass.

I am drawn into his midst where his hot mouth waits for kisses,
and I kiss him and make him into a boy
as all Giant Pacific Octopuses are really
when you take them into your arms.

All their arms fluttering around you
become everywhere sensations of pleasure.
So, his sweet eye looks at me and his little mouth kisses me
and I swear he has the body of a Greek god,
my Giant Pacific Octopus boychik.

So this was what was in store
when I first saw him in the aquarium
huddled miserably on the rock
ignoring the feast of live crabs
the put in his windowed swimming pool.

You take home a creature like that, who needs love,
who is a mess when you meet
but who can open up like a flower with petal arms waving around—a beauty—
and it is a total pleasure to have him around,
even collapsible as he is like a big toy,
for as long as he will stay, one night or a lifetime,
for as long as god will let you have him.

 

“Sex Among the Savages”

in memoriam Tobias Schneebaum

Letters from an adventurous friend describe
his visits to a naked Stone Age tribe
(all smeared with pig fat and for my tastes skinny)
surviving in the forests of New Guinea.

My friend explores what is usually missed
by the explorer or the scientist.
Enough, then, abut carved shields and deadly spears,
spiral inserts for the nose and ears,
which make the tribesmen unglamorously fierce,
or foot-long penis sheathes they wear erect
that anthropologists eagerly collect—
things with which I’ve always been slightly bored
and the secrets I want to hear about ignored.

Now my friend confirms what one suspects:
There’s more to primitive life than artifacts,
or head-hunting, or eating human brains—
though he assures me that a lot of that remains.

The missionaries claim they’ve wiped it out,
but he’s learned from his Stone Age friends, first-hand, about
one of the ancient traditions that endure:
this holds that a boy can’t properly mature
unless he drinks an unspecified amount,
but the more the better, of jungle gism
spurting fresh and joyful from the fount—
good, they believe, for a boy’s metabolism.
What’s more, the future of the tribes depended
on keeping their boys kneeling or upended.
So the men of this people wisely do their best,
my friend writes, in the tribal interest
by shooting a load as often as they can,
and this way the boy learns to be a man.

Pig fat and all, the primitive world of sex,
for those, like my friend, with the nerve to risk their necks.

 

“David’s Dream”

You’re not ready for the convent yet.
-- David del Tredici

He said that he dreamed
that everyone was meeting at the baths tonight
except me.
I’ll be teaching there in the morning
so I couldn’t go.

Well, he’s got my number all right, I’m no fun.
I talk liberation
but my actions show otherwise,
and he dreams me as I really am,
a ruler-snapping nun
keeping the class in line.

My image is definitely bad.

I only show up at the baths
when morning guilt lights up the shabby linoleum
and the employees are scrubbing the love juice
off the walls and ceilings of the orgy room,
and the customers are putting on their jeans
anxious to go home.

That’s when I arrive with my attendance book
and a sad sack stuffed with experience,
teaching what I don’t believe in
and nobody wants to hear.

THE LESSON
If all you can do is teach
don’t do it at the baths.
If you go to the baths
don’t go in the morning.
And if you go into the steam room
take off your habit, baby,
and leave your ruler home.

 

© 2008 Edward Field

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Edward Field is the author of more than ten books of poetry, including Counting Myself Lucky and A Frieze for a Temple of Love, and a memoir, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era. He is also coauthor of three fiction books (written with Neil Derrick, published under the pseudonym of Bruce Elliot). He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the W.H. Auden Award, the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lambda Literary Award.