Richard Jeffrey Newman

This past Sat­ur­day, my col­league and friend Mar­cia McNair inter­viewed me about my book of poems, The Silence Of Men, on her BlogTalk Radio show, The Power of Poetry. I hope you’ll give a listen.

Mar­cia is a per­cep­tive reader and won­der­ful inter­viewer and her ques­tions led me to see things in my poetry that I hadn’t seen before. My favorite part of the con­ver­sa­tion was about the poem called “Work­ing The Dot­ted Line,” which tells the story of the first time an old girl­friend and I had sex, and she was a vir­gin. What I liked best about Marcia’s read­ing of this piece was her notic­ing my mother’s pres­ence in the poem and how that started me talk­ing about some­thing I often encounter but have never given much seri­ous thought. Most of the men I know, even as adults, are deeply uncom­fort­able with their mother’s sex­u­al­ity, and I don’t under­stand it. Or, to be more accu­rate, while I under­stand intel­lec­tu­ally, I don’t get it emo­tion­ally. As well, they often it pro­foundly dis­turb­ing that I am not made uncom­fort­able not just by the idea of my mother as a sex­ual being, but by the fact that, when I was grow­ing up, I knew – that she made no effort to hide the fact (though she cer­tainly did not rub it in my face either) – that she had sex­ual rela­tion­ships with at least some of the men she dated. I even knew that my mother would occa­sion­ally go to bars, or danc­ing, where men would try to pick her up, or where she might try to pick some­one up her­self, and it didn’t bother me. Indeed, it seemed to me per­fectly nat­ural. Why wouldn’t my mother, who was in her 30s at the time, go out and have a good time, and do things that other sin­gle 30-year-old women did when they social­ized? My mother has been a sin­gle woman since I was around 12 years old, and I have always known that she had a sex life. More to the point, I have never expected her not to have one or to keep it hid­den from me. I met all, or at least most (as far as I know), of the men she dated when I was grow­ing up, and it never seemed strange to me or wrong or awk­ward that she should have men in her life or that I should know she was hav­ing sex with them. (Though it was often, I think, awk­ward for them.) I don’t really have much else to say about this for now, but it is some­thing I want to write about, some­thing I had never really thought to write about until Mar­cia brought it up. Here is the poem:

Work­ing The Dot­ted Line

I don’t remem­ber what vaca­tion
I was home for, or how Beth
man­aged to be in New York
on the one day we’d have
the apart­ment to our­selves,
but I think I recall
my mother’s hang­ing crys­tals
scat­ter­ing the after­noon sun­light
in small rain­bows that shim­mied
on the walls and on our skin,
and I can still see Beth stretch­ing
ner­vous along the length
of the daybed’s mat­tress,
and my fin­gers trac­ing
the ridges of her ribs
as she tugged at my erec­tion.
I’m ready. Let’s do it!

It was her first time, not mine,
but it was my first con­dom,
and I’d for­got­ten to read the direc­tions,
so I stood there grow­ing soft,
squint­ing at the print on the box
telling me the step-by-step
I needed to learn
was on the inside.
I ripped the card­board open
and sat read­ing on the bed’s edge,
thumb­ing the foil-packed
lubri­cated cir­cle,
try­ing to visu­al­ize
what I had to do.
Beth reached into my lap
to ready me again,
but when I tore along the dot­ted line,
our pro­tec­tion, like a gold­fish
taken by hand from its bowl,
slipped from my grasp
and landed under the desk
my mother sat at
when she paid the bills.
When I picked it up,
it was cov­ered with the dust
and small par­ti­cles of dirt
that set­tle daily into all our lives,
so I didn’t put the next one on
till I was kneel­ing hard
between Beth’s open legs.
She raised her­self on her elbows,
smil­ing that the sec­ond skin
we needed to keep us safe
should make me so clumsy,
but once I let go
of what the instruc­tions called
the reser­voir tip — I thought
of the dams hold­ing water back
in the moun­tains near where she lived
and what would hap­pen if they broke—
her smile dis­ap­peared
and bunch­ing the sheet beneath her
into her fists, she lifted
her butt onto the pil­low
we’d heard would make things easier.

I bent for a quick look
at where I had to go
and climbed up onto her,
try­ing with one hand
to be grace­ful and accu­rate
and with the other
to bal­ance over her
with­out falling.
At her first gri­mace
I pulled back. No!
She shook her head, eyes
clamped shut and then
star­ing wide, her voice
a whis­per through clenched teeth,
Just do it! Get it over with!

So I entered her again, try­ing
from the tight­ness in her face
to gauge how hard not to push,
but when she cried out any­way,
I left her body one more time
and crouched over her,
my latex-covered penis
nos­ing down­ward
towards her navel,
and I placed my palms
against her cheeks,
I can­not hurt you like this!

Look, it’s going to hurt, she said.
There’s no other way.
And I’ve cho­sen you!

And since I wanted so much to be her choice,
I kissed her eye­lids and her mouth,
and with my eyes buried
in the hol­low of her neck
moved slowly in
till I felt her flesh
stop giv­ing way. Then,
with one arm around her rib cage
and the other around her head,
hold­ing her tight against my chest,
I pulled down and thrust up
in a sin­gle motion I breathed through
like I was lift­ing heavy boxes.
She screamed into the mus­cle
just above my col­lar bone,
bit deep into my flesh,
and, as she bled onto me,
I bled.

We said noth­ing after­wards.
We didn’t cud­dle
or smile at each other as we dressed
or walk hand in hand
to the train that took her home;
and I did not ask her
what her silence meant,
nor she mine, but if she had,
I would’ve told her this:
My word­less­ness was shame.
I’d no idea how not to hurt her;
and I would’ve told her
I wanted it to do over,
which is what I’d tell her even now.

Tagged Gender, Poetry, Poetry, Published Work, Reading Writing Viewing, Sex, sexual boundaries, Sexuality, the silence of men

Comments are closed.