do I still yearn for my virginity
(Sappho)
What is sex? I had asked you, wont to change the tone.
A good place to start, you giggled and lay beneath.
They say, loss of virginity in moderation is healthy.
Moderation certainly speaks well of us. I can see that.
But is this how you plead your case now? With health advice?!
The phrase “Let’s do it for the sheer
virginity of things” had occurred to me one day,
as I was trying to invent the perfect idiom.
Tell me, what do you remember?
I remember you whispering in my ear.
I remember your lips soaked
with the taste of sweet seed.
What is virginity?, in retrospect, would have been
the better question.
As you know, loss of viriginity does not happen overnight.
In fact, we know it to be a term of degree–
like blood loss, for instance. How does the expression go?:
When it rains, it pours? What a marvellous idiom!
(Wasn’t there a myth about a man who bled out from his head
and drowned the world?)
I am sitting on your bed.
It’s raining.
Chill springs run down
the glass.
This is what two people have left.
Practical relations, which seem
to appease you
but unsettle me.
Do you want to? you ask.
is a rhetorical question.
Don’t stoop and wait there
for the answer.
Third Place ~ Hart House Poetry Contest