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art
Eros, Eros, Eros

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Once upon a time people made art like this: "Earth Waiting" by Eric Gill, wood engraving on paper (1926) !["Earth Waiting" by Eric Gill, wood engraving on paper (1926)](https://assets-global.website-files.com/62ee0bbe0c783a903ecc0ddb/6472b1a7479639353f0fa6cc_idk.jpeg) "Earth Waiting" by Eric Gill, wood engraving on paper (1926) without irony. Who does this now? Few. And we, I think, are the poorer for it. Once upon a time, roughly two thousand years ago in a village in India, an anonymous soul composed this little poem in Prakrit, an extinct peasant dialect of Sanskrit: From the scent of her he knew she had bathed in the river, with the help of rose-apple branches. (tr. by David Ray)      Who writes such poems now? And who among us -- in our screened, aseptic, indoorsy lives -- still knows such red-blooded, en-plein-air delights?      Once upon a time, Sappho, Mirabai, and Denise Levertov. Where are such abashlessly erotic female poets now? Levertov, a greatly various and greatly hallowing poet few seem to read anymore (because she bucked against the fashionable gnomic style of modern poetry and therefore -- because of her staunch lucidity -- doesn't quite lend herself to the serpentine dissimulation of today's graduate schools?) wrote this all-but-unknown poem I discovered in a _festschrift_ dedicated to Kenneth Rexroth: **To Eros** Eros, O Eros, hail thy palate, god who knows good pasta, good bread, good Brie.           The flesh is delicate, we must nourish it: desire hungers for wine, for clear plain water, good strong coffee, as well as for hard cock and throbbing clitoris and the glide and thrust of sentence and paragraph in and up to the last sweet sigh of a chapter's ending. The beauty of freckled squid, flowers of the sea fresh off the boat, graces thy altar, Eros, which is in our eyes. And our lips the blood of berries before we kiss, before we stumble to bed. Our bed must be, in thy service, earth -- as the strawberry bed is earth, a ground for miracles.      What a religion of a poem! A poem that knows the difference between sex and Eros, between pornography and reverence, between Trump/Weinstein/Cosby and Sappho of Lesbos. ("Our bed/ must be, in thy service, earth" might be a credo to live by.)      What's next for us literarily? Perhaps it's to refuse the smarminess and violence of machismo without downplaying the gifts of the body. Perhaps it's to work towards the world the poet Odysseas Eltyis memorably conjures here: "If a separate Paradise exists for each of us, mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words which the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying, _eros, eros, eros_."      In the spirit of Kenneth Rexroth and his great "The Love Poems of Marichiko" (which if you don't know, please hunt down) and _The Song of Songs_ (the greatest work of literature, especially when translated by Ariel and Chana Bloch?), I wrote this suite of poems, written from the perspective of a woman:     **THE TALL ORCHARD GRASSES** _poems to her beloved_ **I** so much of the day is screens driving beside the ocean instead of being in it I prefer elk kelp sea glass yawning my legs open before you **II** the orchard today is sugaring apples dying poppies and wren song my body plaints for you eating lunch in our empty house I remember sunflashes through the oaks your sweating arms and vulnerable face **III** yesterday it rained so hard the water pushed the creek’s boulders down towards the ocean I woke in the dark to echoing muttering tectonic sounds my senses wide and quivering and then wondered wondered almost to hurt how many miles over how many epochs those great rocks had already travelled **IV** the loquats are ripening the wrens are nesting the jasmine is blowing and you are not here my lust steeps in me **V** around you I feel of this earth again a poplar giving voice the red umber of avocado honey gleaming in a jar I know my own power around you I walk through the market like a mob of lions and later you worship me you tell me this shamelessly you say I worship you and smell me and taste me and this only makes me stronger and you more lovely   **VI** it is such a mild sweet-smelling night I have the desire to lay myself down in the tall orchard grasses lay myself down and surrender let my body be my body let my mind list where it will but I’m too scared (my thoughts? the coyotes? the unmeaning stars?) and go inside and open my stupid book and fall asleep without finishing a page **VII** two robins at the birdbath they wade into the clear bright palm of water and drink I think of you wading likewise and drinking from me **VIII** the male wren mistaking his reflection for competition pecks hideously at the windowpane until I hang a sheet there so nothing will he see but then I miss him miss his insistent foolhardy manfulness his desire to slay any suitor however phantom however frail **IX** when you are not here I feel all my energy rise to my head and my head like a balloon uplifting and veering floating me away come here and crush me crush me with arms and stomach and need and want **X** after the storm the fronds of the banana are shredded shredded sorry and limp I begrudge them this begrudge them their spentness their exhaustion their ravishment **XI** where do they come from the slowly moving voluptuously turning strands of spider web drifting over the orchard sitting on the porch I see them pearl sometimes in the sun I heard not so long ago they can travel with their creatures riding them as far as the islands over the sea **XII** this morning when I woke I remembered the sea lions croaking up the canyon you napping in the amber of the oak-saddened bedroom the frightening tenderness I felt near your body’s quiet and that one hour later on my voice above you ragged with its pleasure * * * **Teddy Macker** is the author of the collection of poetry, [“This World”](https://www.amazon.com/This-World-Teddy-Macker/dp/1935952390) (White Cloud Press, 2015). His poetry and fiction have appeared, or are forthcoming, in the Antioch Review, New Letters, Orion, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Tin House. Among his honors is the Reginald S. Tickner Creative Writing Fellowship of the Gilman School in Baltimore. A lecturer in creative writing at UC Santa Barbara, he lives with his wife and daughters on a small farm in the foothills of Carpinteria, California.