An Ode to the Erotic

'This land is not your land,
For the right hand takes what it can,
Ransacks to the mad man.
For this land is not yours or mine to have.
This land was made for the good of itself.'
From No Man's Land by Sufjan Stevens


. . .Perhaps. Perhaps English limps, needy promissory notes,
Each next novelty bleeding half-eaten dictionaries
To the point I'd sigh endlessly or weep;
And yet there is room for lack of faith in my lack of faith.

For
Although our language decays, all
Child-hearted Reality rallies still, bursts into laughter lengthily-
Warm gushes, flutters, wonders at each Other,
Rushing but discovers all destination in the journey.

Two souls long for another glimpse of each other, another chance
To exult in holding hands each other with the one they love.
This is not a spelling or a grammar rule, not something to be spelled out-
Delicate and fierce, something vaguely pronounced in embrace,
In the eyelash flutter of one upon a beloved's face,
Perhaps only to be told most clearly in silent presence.

Reality, no object, has freckles
And a peculiar laugh, or perhaps not.
-Somehow that has always been You,
And where would we go besides pursuing You?
Beyond bathroom stalls and tokens,
O Dirty Word - that is, Divinity - not ever enough spoken . . .


[An ode to the Erotic will inevitably be something reflective of what it praises, in that the ode will not be able to fully praise its subject (since the Erotic is always found in subjects - found in particular ways in particular persons and things - not in an isolated, distilled 'compound') but in this seeing beauty in the particular, the ode seeks for something beyond or 'yet again' in Eroticism itself. This is the reality of the Erotic, in its particular manifestations, in its beautiful tension: if lived-out healthily, the desirer truly seeks the Good beyond the particular person/thing, within which the person/thing subsists (not trying to 'freeze' or 'apprehend' the person/thing desired), but at the same time the desirer seeks and loves the person/thing for her/his/its very manifestation of the Good (not seeking to 'overcome' the person/thing in order to 'get at' the Reality 'behind' the person/thing). The Reality is something in which all persons/things subsist, something 'behind' all things, but It manifests itself in particular subjects, whom we must hunger and thirst to love simply because of their own sake.]

-a-