Sunday, November 6, 2011

lines from The Glass Essay (by Anne Carson) (1995)

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.  
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.  
He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities  
I learned in that one moment  
when I found myself

thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon  
at a man who no longer cherished me.  
There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body  
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of mind and body begs the question.

Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,  
where such necessity grinds itself out.

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