“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age . . . .” Dylan Thomas
I sing the body eclectic, a mix of sparks, age, rage, and change. Everyday an erotic challenge, every day nearer its end. I named what I am—earth-eroticist—once my womb finished its bleed and promises of birth, my children grown to be on their own. What prime is this? Why did it take so long?
Lies color gray hairs. It’s tempting to override stirrings of the sensual though, having suffered through a relationship or too many. Yet what if there was a way to reclaim eros? The hormones have said sayonara. Your partner’s lost a bloom or two? Why not branch out?
To the green, in summer that blows rains and grows trees taller. To the mounded: wild-flowered hills that hold you at the knees. To the clouds: balls of cotton or fast streaks that dare you catch them. Wind strokes your flesh so why edit the full intent of its touch?
Do you pretend that your hands in the dirt, gardener, are only tools when you take the loam with shivering pleasure? As eggplants bulge from their bush and peppers flare hot on the stem, are you sure you’ve no deeper feelings than imagined taste and larder fulfillment? When evening gentles the transpiration in your beds, sun orange on the horizon, I hope you notice the sacral wheel of the spine by way of mons pubis and feel how the heat times two–setting orb and earthen crotch–become one.
In The Land Erotic I wrote:
Elders often develop a lust for gardening. It looks and sounds amorous, because suddenly they care less about what the Joneses will think of their yard and more for the moment: hands digging deep in the dirt or lingering over the beauty that wakes in their plot. We call them garden beds. This is a fractal of the land erotic’s message. May these elders expand that lived thrill into encounters with every tree or creekbed that tries to get their attention. And by the Earth may they feel loved.
The land says, give me your tired genitals, your paper skin, your crate-loads of regret. I am the land in constant flux, dying and rebirthing wet then dry then back to slathering. I am the home where you have always fit in, never more giving than now when you’re reminded that you, humans—though not me, until the oceans boil, or the red giant comes roasting—will see an end to your flesh and your attachment to here.
“And I am dumb to tell . . .” the poet Dylan Thomas says, about the lit green fuse that entwines his own eros with nature—“dumb” as in unable to communicate. He longs to remind a rose, mountain, or wind that the same universal energy runs through humans too.
Do they really not know this? Or do they simply overlook us, with our ideas of separation and feigned superiority? Still, the poet says: May the Force be with you! Perhaps he should have been a gardener too. Perhaps he was singing a hymn, scouting for love, or stroking his “crooked worm” when the green fuse spluttered into word-gasm, the beloved Earth grasped whole.
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