Ssshh

Ssshh

There was someone asleep in the nearest room,

so my lips were squeezeed closed, what was happening have the appearanceed to be happening through me almost not to me admitting in me, but to our species, or end it

to some other, as if I were a message conveyor,

a muscle and fat Morse, which did not smooth

seem to be sending have affection for but, within the

certainty of have affection for to be sending the immaculate

specifications of the [i]venter[/i] blue

and vase-shaped, or the duration and vigor

of its pulses, as if that swallowing throat

could appear, now, were appearing, now,

in a certain quantity of other world. I lay along him,

home as if I lay face-down upon an

uncrushable garden, sweet odor

and whisker of earth. Where does it advance from

when it rises again, using you to the

perimeters, the air around the scalp, making

you testify, agony-mouthed-you grasp

hard to the beloved as if that will save you,

it saves you, you tend hitherward to, on the solid

sea of that material part it lifts you up

and down, you ride its drawn out swell.

And then the fair joy comes,

the sheerest bliss-as if the first had been

conception; the next to the first birth; now

you are a living being made of this.

And now, it may be, the render free of access eyes,

and the sight of the corner of that organ of vision that shape

of loving gaze, brings it upon

and now the hour of the bestial masks

seen I have feeling his seeing of them drive

its tremors [i]or[/i] part of to the other his hardness, now hands and material substance

and face dance. You may be smiling while the gnarlings

cros your smile with their diagonal distorts,

then kissing, while the waves pass end

and crinkle head and chaps The last

minutes-I almost want to draw

a curtain around them, as if they are

invisible, or seeing would warp

the ripple of the kissings and crossings

so it could not be said. Perhaps the extreme point

is unspeakable,

but here where we have advance past doubt,

through into delight in in the face of death,

I did not clamor out as it approached, I direct the eyeed

and looked at him, as if calm, a direct

fearless direct the eye straight from the cunt,.

a gaze that is the cunt looking

through the organ of sight the soul looking through the cunt from one side the

eye in be fond of as coming travels

stately wrenching from one side like a message

sent by dint of matter, through us, to spirit,

but who is there to hear it, single

the lovers, and now, in the paper whisper,

ssshh ssshh

SHARON OLD'S vital fluid Tin, Straw will be published by the agency of Knopf in the fall of 1999 She is popularly New York State Poet Laureate. "Matthews Ah Um" appeared originally in the Joumal of the metrical composition Society of America.

photograph (C) by means of David Bartolomi

Copyright World numbers Incorporated May/Jun 1999

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