Issue 169, Fall 2009

Elegy for the Death of Sex at the Coming of

After the How-To-Books on shelves at Barnes & Noble,
those finer volumes, compendiums for child rearing,

with somber “bombs of warning,” or italics for questions,
grids which set to evolution answers you feared

were near, that after the coming of a baby,
there wouldn’t be any sex that you could remember,

no midnight passion, no spark of nubbed opportunity,
like after a snack of milk and cookies, or watching

the 11 o’clock news; on a Sunday when to wake for it,
was to lose that weekend manner of late sleep.

All of that can go, the pages stayed, though a manual
imagines not your own particulars, but a general alarm.

How wrong they were, you then had thought, remembering
that fiery eve, upon returning from first new week

in Nanjing, where you two, tired of being parents,
no, tired in being parents, the initiate of bottles, finality

of poops, a tepidness that’s bathwater, and had begun
to get lost in boot camp, the hustle to please, to answer

a voice never heard once before, but now, cannot help
but hear again, and yet again.

In Guangzhou, at the stork hotel of babies and baby farmers,
as the innocence of first caregiving was losing shine,

you lay her down early in rosewood crib,
watched in wonder at the split-tired breathing of her husky tones,

her howl of blanket, her suddenness,
in that wonder, two had become parents,

the dotted lines of waiting year finally reaching signature.
And after, both tired (already tired) of losing lips,

crawled together onto a single bed under a stopped air conditioner
to cool your bodies down to sleep.

But for some memory, some immediate recall, your male began
nibbling her upper lip, as if it were a small cookie, not candy,

a sustenance not sweet, but carbohydrate, steel,
yet water-like, an eel, something familiar but softer

than anything ever lipped before.
And so the kissing ran, along the length of your sweat-driven

ancient bodies, your beleaguered insane selves,
loving not as if to reclaim a notion of first dating,

but your own birthing begins, some water in a womb
to be discovered in, again and yet unknown.

And you wept, leapt into your passions
until the hard thumping propulsions climaxed,

killed you two into a sleep of one.  But that seemed to be
a last, a final dip, the book’s prophecies kept.

Months later, two stand before white-panels of small
slumber, and this her, to whom both genuflect.

Every kiss passed now, dry and drier, ghosting as in
a mirror, impenetrable and harried smooth.

You’ve tried to recall some sex older than a couple
a year ago, older than they could ever be,

now seemingly past and lapsed into an irretrievable,
another near, feared gone.