Ecstasy When Love Rocks, Part 2

You Drive Me Crazy: Love Poems for Real Life
by Mary D. Esselman, Elizabeth Ash Vélez

(Page 2 of 2)

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 “steeltoed 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.”

Copyright © 2005 by Mary Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez

About the Author

Elizabeth Ash Vélez lives in Washington, D.C.