by C. K. Williams
Special. Big tits.
Says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our
neighborhood newsstand.
But forget her breasts.
A lush, fresh-lipped blond, skin glowing gold, sprawls
there, resplendent.
60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than
harlots, can still stir me.
Maybe a coming of age in the American sensual darkness,
never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina,
has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the
eye.
Always that erotic murmur,
I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire.
God knows though, there are worse twists your obsessions can
take.
Last year in Israel, a young ultra-orthodox Rabbi guiding
some teenage girls through the Shrine of the Shoah
forbade them to look in one room. Because there were images
in it he said were licentious.
The display was
a photo. Men and women stripped naked,
some trying to cover their genitals, others too frightened
to bother,
lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch.
The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze.
What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them.
Even that though. Another confession:
Once in a book on pre-war Poland,
a studio portrait, an
absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes.
I kept finding myself at her page.
That she died in the camps made her -- I didn't dare wonder
why --
more present, more precious.
Died in the camps, that too people -- or Jews anyway -- kept
from their children back then.
But it was like sex, you didn't have to be told.
Sex and death, how close they can seem.
So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me,
sometimes I think I confound them.
My wife's loveliness almost consumes me.
My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds.
When we make love, her holding me everywhere all around me,
I'm there and not there.
My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions,
I live my life over, as though I were drowning.
Then I am drowning,
in despair at having to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful.
Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not
having been slaughtered, or enslaved.
And not having to know history's next mad rage or
regression, it might be a relief.
No. Again, no. I don't mean that for a moment.
What I mean is the world holds me so tightly -- the good and
the bad --
my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit Venus
with her sham heat, and her bosom probably plumped with gel,
so moves me
my breath catches. Vamp. Siren. Seductress.
How much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she
knows.
How she incarnates our desperate human need for regard,
our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty, to be cherished
by glances,
if by no more, of something like love,
or love.
