The Floating Poem, Unnumbered
By: Adrienne Rich
Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine—tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth— your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.
"Floating Poem, Unnumbered" from “Twenty-One Love Poems," from The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 by Adrienne Rich
Lovely. Erotic and “explicit” even--but so much more than that...and mostly a layering of metaphor, simile, fresh and original language...in short everything that makes poetry provoke emotion. I think Sharon Olds learned a lot from Rich in her book The Gold Cell, or maybe she was simply discovering similar territory--that evoked by writers like Ninn and so many others.
Sensuality and poetry are one and the same, whatever the topic I think. Nature, war, life and death, but love - even unsentimentalized (maybe especially that), well, yes.