Virginal Orgy

In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat

Senior, Captain of the high-school team,

Carried us to the Tournament of Champions,

And we won. I left the game with my friend

The hourglass beauty, and her friend the President

Of the Sophomore class. He put an arm

Around each of us,

as if there were two of him, one

for her, and one for me, and I felt,

through him, linked to her long, tilted

eyes and Scythian-bow lips

and very small waist and the large globes of her

breasts. It was almost as if I could look

into a mirror held by Mike

and see myself as Liz, the way we had

seen ourselves as Solomon Wheat.

I felt that Mike was hugging me

Partly so he could hug Liz,

as if I were the small price he was

paying for embracing her glory. But mostly

I felt his warm, male, popular

arm around me, it was April, we were walking near

a small, flowering tree, and he steered us

into, and under, and up inside it,

and he kissed Liz, I looked into the maze

of the living stems of the wild nosegays,

and then he turned, and kissed me,

and his lips were so much bigger and softer

than my mother’s, each of his lips was larger

than her whole mouth, and the skin of his lips was like

a newborn’s skin, and the flesh of his mouth,

underneath, was so soft that each lip

seemed to be splashing like a bucket inside

The back of my head got faint, like early

Communion on an empty stomach, and that central

core, down inside me, did the

thing like a heavy gulp, with the rings

of hotness circling out. And then

he was kissing Liz, I was standing within

the standing bouquet, the inside of the tree not

estranged to me, the tightness and loose

burstness of its crowded petals

not unknown to me, and then

he kissed me again, and this time

I had forgotten my mother-this was my first

return to him, my mouth already

wise in its hunger, feeling as if nothing

I would wish would be forbidden to it.

When he kissed Liz, I stood aside

enchanted in cherry-trance, waiting for what

was promised and would return, as if

by vow of matter, the low central

throat gulping in emotion as if swallowing

tears. I would look around, in the bower—

the twigs and branches of our canopy

made triangles, isosceles and right, and a dropping

down of a tryst hypotenuse—

in the cone of the tree I almost understood

Geometry, the Trinity,

Triune Love, and the fierce tingle

of the triangle I had whirl-struck

as a child. And now I knew the kiss,

and from it the hour when the other woman

would go her way, and his other arm

would come around, like the other half

of the sky, and all the angles would close

and the wings of the sphere open, slowly burst open