What Can I Say, I’m Not a Landscape
 
I was an American girl. I learned good love
is me on the bottom, facing up; good sex
is me on the bottom, facing down. I can overthink
anything, even now, lying sideways between sheets,
inches from you, wearing naked
like antelope in a rented tux, mermaid trying on shoes.
I’m telling you I think I forget how. Your face I love
is now so weirdly strange I have to ask
Have we met before? And here’s where you hold still
while I climb down from the thought-tree,
its branches of fog. Your palm on my flank doesn’t move
while you wait for me to remember, hand
over hand, what hands and skin are for.
I thought I’d never write a sex poem
because I’m not a landscape, and you’re
no conquistador. You don’t map my blue rivers
or trace with your tongue every hillock and hollow.
Also because I can’t be serious about your penis––
eager tail wagging its own good self,
taut rod dowsing for my pleasure. Also because
what that pleasure urges me to speak is not sexy
but trades porn’s slick ejaculations for lists
of dessert toppings––Butterscotch! Brickle! Hot caramel!––
or orchestra sections––Yes, yes, the strings and the brass!
This, after we’ve emerged doe-shy from thickets
to mingle our warm breath
while the green song rises around us.
But what else can I say? I like my sex
even and gentle. I burned my bedroll,
hung up my spurs long ago. When my body
arrives from far fields, I like to let it
amble toward a heated stable, plunge its muzzle
in cool water, hay racks full and sweet.
Later we’ll nicker and lean into each other,
dreaming wild herds of words that startle and roam,
darken a far ridge, then disappear.