55. The Cunnilingus Poem

The Cunnilingus Poem

1887 L. C. SMITHERS tr. Forberg's Man.
Class. Erotology v. 122 A man who
is in the habit of putting out his tongue for
the obscene act of cunnilinging.
1897 H. Ellis Stud. Psychol. Sex. I. iv. 98
The extreme gratification
is cunnilingus,..sometimes called sapphism.

--Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, online



The gratification can be extreme. That’s true.
As I look at this poem, I’m feeling good
about it, but you know as well as I do
the poem’s language—yes, that’s right,
its tongue—mustn’t degrade, devalue,
pornographize, evade, or abuse its subject.
The poem’s been given a location, and I feel
the weight of circumscription
in my hands. The poem has opened.

It chooses to tell. Showing may also occur.
The poem does not advise discretion.
It decides to locate itself respectfully where
it believes it’s been invited. It chooses to be human
and hopes you’ll understand. Now it proceeds beyond
the play of preliminarity.

Her apartment was in a cheap, two-story stucco
heap—palatial compared to my place.
We lay on her bed in a close, hot room: Spring.
California’s Central Valley, deep between
Coast Range and Sierra Nevada, had already
ovened up. She kept her window open. She lay back.
The pillow-cases were bright red. She relaxed.
She opened her legs. I went down on her eagerly―
I might say earnestly. Great erotic generosity
inspired me, or so I chose to believe
about myself.

Wait. There’s no rush. We have time to instruct
anatomy, biology, and pornography to go away,
to leave us alone. Believe it or not, this poem
likes its privacy.

Hot, stuffy, small, and cheap, the room
transformed itself. She and I—well,
we took our time. There was no rush. Our time.
Her room. The heat. I took her own sweet time
and chose to give some of it back to her.

It was sex, yes indeed; also unalloyed life. We
devoured a ripe, wet, hot interval of the stuff,
life. That’s all. That’s not a little bit. When
she orgasmed, she seemed to have nothing
to do with the pseudo-scientific infinitive,
to orgasm. She screamed. That happens
to be the correct word. Screamed. She yelled
and shouted, too. It was louder for being
privately public. “Ecstasy”? I don’t know.


That word makes me nervous. It belongs
to romance novels and a drug. I’m in no rush
to use it. Anyway, her sounds were so loud
they startled me, and for a moment, I lost my place.
I smiled while I was turning to cunniling
into a conjugated, tense present. There was no rush.
I found my place again, went back to work.

So far so good? I raised my head
from the loving work. It is,
can be, good work,—
cunnilingus. It shouldn’t be labor
but can be more than play. . . . I’d
raised my head to listen to her and to
watch the rest of her body and her face

and take in the holy scene of the room. Is
holy too much? Yes, but let’s leave
it there, posted on the stucco heap
like a notice from a landlord. I offered
her a pillow with which to muffle the aria,
if she so chose. She chose not so.
Well played. I heard people giggling outside
in California, on the black asphalt of an
apartment-complex’s baked parking lot,
no rush of breeze out there. I smiled, and I

went down again into what had become for her
a rich source of satisfaction, a fabled
California mine, a vein of golden pleasure,
a rush. I’d become a famously employed miner,
producing lavish treasure with simple tools,
tongue and mouth and lips. I exhibited care
and the will to give my head. Such a primitive,
post-modern afternoon it was.

It wasn’t history,
but it was the best we two could do.
She was the only person she’d ever be.
She wanted to be satisfied on a
rickety bed in a blazing, stucco apartment.
I knew her, and I showed up. I
gave her what she invited me to give.
It was basic and civilized, polite
and rude. It tasted and smelled
the way it ought to. She became

immortally satisfied for an interval
of afternoon. I swear I still heard
people laughing at sex-sounds coming,
so to shout, from her open window. I
worked at loving, making a delivery,
freighting freedom and joy to the realm
of her body. That’s an overstatement.

I know the names of body-parts,
and so do you, and this isn’t about that,
but please see references to tongue, lips,
mouth, legs, and head above. The window,
her legs, my mouth, our lives were open.

You can’t rush these things, but it
ended. I was a sweating, naked man
with a sense of charity, accomplishment,
and gratitude. She was the most contented
naked woman I’d seen thus far, so I didn’t
say anything, and I didn’t want anything.

There’s never been a rush to remember,
and it’s customary to keep such things
private unless your profession is
pornography or Congress. Oh, well, this is
a poem, and poems gets interested in this
kind of thing.

Writing this, I feel good about it.
I smile and pay homage to her ecstasy,
which was different from that word.
She filled herself up. She
shouted, my mouth pressed to her
self-possessed body, which thrilled.
I thrilled at fearsome pleasure. There’s

no rush, but one must act. Communion
occurs so variously, mysteriously,
sometimes with stucco and asphalt
nearby, and the rent due. I remember
rubbing my face on her thighs and then
on cotton sheets to get some wet and sweat
off, not all. I remember peace, the peace of
a wordless afterwards. No rush, no rush at all.
If this poem offends you, you know why,
and I hope you didn’t read this far,
but if you did, it’s over now. Be well.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom