Ode to the Penis, and: Unmatching Legs Ode, and: Wild Ode

Ode to the Penis

Someone told me that what I writeabout men is objectifying. So I ask you,O general idea of the penis, do you mindbeing noticed? You who stand, in the mind—erect and not, old and young—for all your representations, O abstractprinciple, haven’t you maybe beenwaiting for your turn to be sung? I thinkyou’re lovely and brave, and so interesting, you arelike a creature, with your head, and trunk,as if you have a life of your own. But you areinnocent, you are not your own man,you are no more responsible for your actions,than the matter of the brain for its thoughts. And you’ve had a mixedhistory—you’ve been taken intocarnage, as the instrumentof it, and you yourself have been playedto produce the desperate screams. Oftenyou have not been protected, nor been used to protect,and oft not been respected, nor wieldedto respect. And yet most of your historyhas been spent in joy. And I wonder how ithas felt, being so adored as you have been,and feared. And what is it like, for you—if you couldlook down, from your Platonic cloudof categories—when two of youare engaged together, or married—yourselfprimed, yourself to your own power? And being a concept, are you smart, do you knowyou’re equal to your sister concept,and even that you came from her,back at the invention of the separate male—the ovaries heavying down toward the earth,the organ of orgasm growing and growing.I cannot imagine you, from within—but as asage said of a god, I do not wantto be sugar, I want to taste sugar!But that’s just my heteromania talking,and you’re not homo or hetero—or visibleor manifest, you do not existexcept as an imaginary quorumof all your instances. So I’m notflirting with you, I’m just sayingI like you—not as an object buta subject, a prime mover, a workingtheory of plumbing and ecstasy,a boy’s pride and anxiety,windsock of zephyr and gale, halfof the equation of creation.

Unmatching Legs Ode

I don’t know why I am fairly cheerfulabout my unmatching legs. I am notcheerful about my foot-soles, which werelike two brains, reading the earth,and now have less than half their nerves, they are thenumbskulls to whom I trust my balance, theirsurfaces crinkled tinfoil made of rubber.But when I lie on the floor, on my back,and look up, at my lower limbs, thoselong feelers, I like them, even though you cannot tell if the left iswithered or the right fat—the rightis swollen. When I was a young woman,I thought that the green line down the innercalf—the great saphenous vein—was a Nile beauty mark, and the way itrose, when I was carrying my first young, there wassomething weirdly cool how it fit between theledges of the gastrocnemiusand soleus, like a snake between twostrata of rock. So when I see the leg’s mass,I am almost proud of it, that it couldfit in it one and a half of its fellow.And the skinny leg, the original one,how can it be that I like the healedgouge on it, from the edge of the porchstair, when I fell upward, and the onefrom the corner fang of the truck door,they hold the places I’ve been, they are likepassport stamps from his kingdom. I have alwaysliked my legs, the way the double stem haslifted the big odd flower of me upand up. It’s as if I fell in lovewith them, when they and I began tolearn to walk together. The two of them werebest friends, who could press against each otherand feel the love, at...