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.