God/Love Poem

By: Lenore Kandel

there are no ways of love but/beautiful/
       I love you all of them

I love you / your cock in my hand
       stirs like a bird
in my fingers
as you swell and grow hard in my hand
forcing my fingers open
with your rigid strength
you are beautiful / you are beautiful
you are a hundred times beautiful
I stroke you with my loving hands
        pink-nailed long fingers
I caress you
I adore you
my finger-tips… my palms…
your cock rises and throbs in my hands
a revelation / as Aphrodite knew it

       there was a time when gods were purer
       /I can recall nights among the honeysuckle
       our juices sweeter than honey
       / we were the temple and the god entire/

I am naked against you
and I put my mouth on you    slowly
I have longing to kiss you
and my tongue makes worship on you
you are beautiful

your body moves to me
flesh to flesh
skin sliding over golden skin
as mine to yours
     my mouth    my tongue    my hands
my belly and my legs
against your mouth    your love
sliding… sliding…
our bodies  move and join
unbearably

your face above me
     is the face of all the gods
         and beautiful demons
your eyes…

         love touches love
         the temple and the god
         are one

Amazon: Jack Kerouac immortalized her in his novel Big Sur. A student of Zen, she hung out with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and was a speaker at San Francisco’s Human Be-In. But Lenore Kandel was no muse or hanger-on; she was a brilliant lyric poet, often unabashedly erotic, and that’s where her legacy lies.

You can find this poem in — Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel