This is ecstasy at its best, we think, when you can loosen up enough simply to enjoy the pleasure of the moment (rather than worrying about the future or longing for more of what you've got). Li-Young Lee's “From Blossoms,” for example, is all about the bliss of the here and now. As he and his partner devour “succulent peaches” bought at a roadside stand, the speaker is overcome by pure happiness, struck by his desire “to take what we love inside,/to carry within us an orchard…to hold/the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into/the round jubilance of peach.” He celebrates the opportunity to live—if only for one summer day—“from joy/to joy to joy, from wing to wing,/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
In Jacques Prévert's “Alicante” the speaker presents a similar picture—a still life, actually, in one short poem—of perfect ecstasy:
An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of night
Warmth of my life.
So much is left unsaid in this poem, but so much can be imagined: the orange still uneaten, the lover ripe in bed (her dress cast aside as if in the haste of passion). And this is no random lover; this is the special “you” to whom the poem is addressed, the person the speaker calls the “Warmth of my life.” Poised in that delicious moment between anticipation and gratification, the speaker realizes he's been given the temporary gift of exquisite love (“Sweet present of the present”).
Utter sensual delight, that's what ecstatic love can deliver, an experience so euphoric it leaves the speaker in Langston Hughes's “When Sue Wears Red” testifying like a religious convert (or like a man having an orgasm). “Come with a blast of trumpets,/Jesus!” he exclaims when describing his red-hot love, Susanna Jones, whose beauty “Burns in [his] heart a love-fire sharp like pain.” It's hard to say whether the speaker's attraction fuels his love for Susanna or vice versa, but who really cares, so long as both the love and the attraction are there? Who doesn't want their lover to feel this passionate, from first sight to fiftieth anniversary?
Hughes's poem takes us to the heart—or perhaps the loins—of what most people think of when they hear the term “ecstasy” in the context of love: wicked-good sex. Sure, you can have your desperately yearning romantic poems (like the Neruda and the Atwood), and yes, you can enjoy your bouncy, gorgeous love poems (like the Cummings or the Lee), but as Hughes might say, “Sweet, silver trumpets,/ Jesus!” there's nothing like a really sexy poem to drive home the full meaning of “ecstasy.” Not that sex alone can give you the complete ecstasy experience—and if you think that's all you need, get ready for a quick ecstasy crash—but a little physical sizzle can keep a strong love relationship hot and healthy. We say, amen to that!
Speaking of Jesus and sex, it just so happens that seventeenth-century religious poet John Donne, author of the Holy Sonnets, also wrote what is arguably the sexiest poem ever produced in English, Elegie XIX: “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” The poem is one long striptease, in which the speaker—with great tenderness and humor—directs his lover to undress, one article of clothing at a time. “Off with that girdle,” he tells her; “Unlace your self” from that corset (which, he adds, has enviable proximity to her breasts); drop that gown (to reveal a body as beautiful “As when from flowery meads th'hills shadowe steales”); and then “softly tread” into this bed, “love's hallow'd temple.” Smooth seducer, the speaker mixes the romantic with the lustful, praising his lover's beauty in order to get her in bed, then playfully asking permission to explore her body as if it's a new land he has just discovered: “Licence my roaving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below.” Donne may seem daunting to non–poetry lovers, being an old seventeenth-century guy, but he's a dirty-minded, smart, and funny old guy, and well worth the read for all ecstasy lovers.
Like Donne's “To His Mistress,” Dorianne Laux's “The Shipfitter's Wife” is an erotic undressing poem—only in this one the wife peels off her husband's sweaty work clothes, unlaces his “steel-toed boots,” strokes his ankles and feet, and then “open[s] his clothes and take[s]/the whole day inside,” from the “miles of copper pipe” to the “Spark of lead/kissing metal,” to the climax of “the whistle,/and the long drive home.” Who would have thought the language of shipyard work could sound so sexy? But to the wife, that
is
what's sexy; the grit and grime of domestic life with her husband. In fact, she says she “loved [her husband] most” when she could soothe and make love to him, despite—or perhaps because of—his “cracked hands” and forehead “anointed with grease.”
Sure, roll your eyes, say we're romanticizing the hell out of living with someone day in and day out. But how fun is it to read a really hot poem about married sex (or shall we say, sex between two people who have been committed to each other for a long time)? So many of us tend to think that ecstasy is something you experience only at the beginning of an affair, as in Kim Konopka's “I Want.” The speaker in that poem can't wait for her lover to move in, so that she can live her fantasy of playing house, of “cook[ing] naked and drunk,” with “kisses bitten between bites.”
If you're lucky, you'll experience that kind of ecstasy moment not only when you first fall in love, but throughout many years of being together. Well, maybe you won't necessarily cook naked and drunk, since life isn't always a Hollywood romantic comedy. But maybe, despite the ups and downs of long-term love, despite your most jaded and cynical inclinations, every once in a while you'll find yourself giddy with desire for your partner, grateful for the chance to “take what we love inside,” as Li-Young Lee put it, to live “from joy/to joy to joy…/from blossom to blossom to/impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
I Want to Breathe
I want to breathe
you in I'm not talking about
perfume or even the sweet odour
of your skin but of the air
itself I want to share
your air inhaling what you
exhale I'd like to be that
close two of us breathing
each other as one as that.
JAMES LAUGHLIN
One Hundred Love Sonnets:
XVII
I D
ON'T
L
OVE
Y
OU AS
I
F
Y
OU
W
ERE A
R
OSE
I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire.
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride;
I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
PABLO NERUDA (T
RANS
. M
ARK
E
ISNER
)
Sunday Night in the City
Hand in hand, we lie on the bed,
our long legs crossed like folded
wings, our long feet touching the
footboard in shadow, carved like a headstone
with grapes. Your hair is ruffled, dark
as black walnut, curled like the tendrils of
vines. Your right hand is in my right
hand. My left hand is in your left.
Arms linked like skaters, we lie
under the picture of farmland: brush
dark and blurred as smoke, trees
lifting their ashen fish-skeletons,
and central to it, over us,
the calm pond
silent as if eternal.
SHARON OLDS
Variation on the Word
Sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
MARGARET ATWOOD
i carry your heart with me
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
E. E. CUMMINGS
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted
Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
LI-YOUNG LEE
Alicante
An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet present of the present
Cool of night
Warmth of my life.
JACQUES PRÉVERT (T
RANS
. L
AWRENCE
F
ERLINGHETTI
)
When Sue Wears Red
When Susanna Jones wears red
Her face is like an ancient cameo
Turned brown by the age.
Come with a blast of trumpets,
Jesus!
When Susanna Jones wears red
A queen from some time-dead Egyptian night
Walks once again.
Blow trumpets, Jesus!
And the beauty of Susanna Jones in red
Burns in my heart a love-fire sharp like pain.
Sweet silver trumpets,
Jesus!
LANGSTON HUGHES
Elegie XIX:
To His Mistress Going to Bed
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heavens Zone glittering,
But a far fairer world incompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busie fooles may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chyme,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envie,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when from flowry meads th'hills shadowe steales.
Off with that wyerie Coronet and shew
The haiery Diademe which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shooes, and then softly tread
In this loves hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be
Receavd by men: thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomets Paradice, and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easly know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My Myne of precious stones: My Emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes. Jems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in mens views,
That when a fools eye lighteth on a Jem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures, or like books gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are mystick books, which only wee