In my time I’ve run into a lot of people who haven’t really read any good sex poems. Yes, I said it, sex poems. We seem to think that poetry, wouldn’t ever, explicitly, go into that sort of thing. And if it did — it would probably be difficult for the poet not to sound obscene or pornographic — right? (not that theres anything wrong with any of those things in this postmodernist hell that we live in). Of course you’ve all stumbled upon implicit erotica in just about everything, but explicit, contemporary and good sex poetry? It’s not likely that you have (unless, of course you’ve been on this planet for more than 30 years).

Anyway, there was a great exodus of books from my room to my study (a whole mass had accumulated next to my bed and it was getting too hard to move around it) and a little batch of poems from first year fell out of an old anthology.  My first year poetry prof was a genius — she loaded us up with all sorts of great poetry and didn’t even assign most of it. I carried it all home in my back pack and read it all, like a good little undergraduate. These two little gems shown out at me and I remembered how good they were. Here you are, great sex poetry by the excellent poet Sharon Olds.

Greed and Aggression

Someone in Quaker meeting talks about greed and aggression
and I think of the way I lay the massive
weight of my body down on you
like a tiger lying down in gluttony and pleasure on the
elegant heavy body of the eland it eats
the spiral horn pointing to the sky like heaven.
Ecstasy has been given to the tiger,
forced into its nature the way the
forcemeat is cranked down the throat of the held-goose,
it cannot help it, hunger and the glory of
eating packed at the center of each
tiger cell, for the life of the tiger, so there will
always be tigers on the earth, their stripes like
stripes of night and stripes of fire-light
so if they had a God it would be striped,
burnt-gold and black, the way if
I had a God it would renew itself the
way you live and live while I take you as if
consuming you while you take me as if
consuming me, it would be a God of
love as complete satiety,
greed and fullness, aggression and fullness, the
way we once drank at the body of animal
until we were so happy we could only
faint, our mouths running into sleep.

IT

Sometimes we fit together like the creamy
speckled three-section body of the banana, that
joke fruit, as sex was a joke when we were kids,
and sometimes it is like a jagged blue comb of glass across
my skin,
and sometimes you have me bent over as thick paper can be
folded, on the rug in the center of the room
far from the soft bed, my knuckles pressed against the grit in the grain of the rug’s
braiding where they
laid the rags tight and sewed them together,
my ass in the air like a lily with a wound on it
and I feel you going down into me as
if my own tongue is your cock sticking
out of my mouth like a stamen, the making and
breaking of the world at the same moment,
and sometimes it is sweet as the children we had
thought were dead being brought to shore in the
narrow boats, boatload after boatload.
Always I am stunned to remember it,
as if I have been to Saturn or the bottom of a trench in the
sea floor, I
sit on my bed the next day with my mouth open and think of it.