by Susan Luzzaro

SOME HARD COCK BLONDIE?
scratched into the morning mud.
Though more gray than blond or perhaps
because more gray than blondó
hard cock was the last thing on my mind.
More like breathing the rain-washed airó
the layered green, I was tossing salad waste
to little rutting rabbits, Zen with the moment,
with the nettled fieldó
the rest of the walk all I thought of was hard cock.

The words more threat than invitation,
though the question mark hung delicately at the end.
The threat more posture than actionóbut pukeó
alien mushroom-colored flesh, pointed & pushy.
Wretch, my stomach said.
Cock, my mind continued, isnít everything.

Some days nap in place of sex,
some days the solitary fingering of words,
some days a good bookís fertile offering,
or twilight is the orgasmó
so little time, so much worldódead, even mud will be exotic.

Celibate for days I buzzed pure bee
in love with the flowered field.
Raptors flew overhead. A gray fox
flushed from her burrow by the recent rain
streaked across my path. But a horse
is the real thing I found out recentlyó
not a substitute penis as some are wont to say.
My first in twenty years lingered in my headó
thighs stretched wide across the western saddle,
slow lick of leather, rhythmical rub of walk,
my clitoris hypnotized, swollen like
the Sweetwater River at my side.

Itís like ions in the air sometimes,
have you noticed? Youíre walking around
in your asexual bubble, but the air itself
is charged with erotic energy.
Or pheromones, phantasmagoric come-hithers
trailing behind, beckoning not
beautiful butterfly, but boar, or Fausto,
the neighbor who called to report a miracle
at 1:10 the night beforeóhis first erection in five years.
Boundaries must be drawn, even in the air.

Call it pheromones or perverse inspiration,
but I began to want hard cockó
not the omnivorous kind of the bearded blond boy
hiding in the trees with girlie magazines glistened to his knees,
not the disembodied miracle of Fausto,
rising from the dead after five dormant years,
but cock in the tenderest best ways I have known it,
all attached to the one I love.

Though the red-winged blackbirds are just arriving,
I canít walk down this path for a while,
not till the hard cock withers, or the words weather.
I must abandon the thrusting cinquefoil,
sinewy fennel, to their own green throes,
turn back to peopled places,
where the body is tamed by time, by work, by clothes,
where cock & cunt are the last wild remnant
of the animal mindóor the day.

Susan Luzzaro lives in Chula Vista. She is professor of English at Southwestern College. Her most recent book is Flesh Envelope (West End Press, Albuquerque, NM).