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| What Happy Women Feel* I now pull down, from off my collarbones, A magic fringe of spiritskin, a growth Which has an anchoring, blood-ruching, at my waist, And a beginning Ñ stitches! Ñ in my sex. The physic of the soundless popping feeling Filling me open as I tug and free Thirty-six hundred invisible strings, Is brutal self-correction given the sack. How will the nipples, breastbone, heart, lungs, breath Sustain the release of the dense flesh web, Each thread a day of my life lived away From sense, a harp-y vest strung to glut with woe? The pattern of my will, its action in Unsparing agitation, inquiry, Is, too, Ñ how? Ñ humanely, a needle in my sleep, Soulflesh exposed in amulet tatters. I pull a strip: I never have had what Are called relations with a human soul. It cannot be lovemaking I have had. What lover worth the name would simply leave The veil intact, having kissed another Yarn in place, hallowing another day Of error hiding, making known, remove! Remove the wear of endless, loveless days: I'm self-erected, -entered, -decorated: A dandelion's shaken path through space; The tentacles of inessential time; A hairshirt skirt of years thinned out by fear And threaded through propriety by chance. I mean that I was born American And vulviform: I am but literate, Yet, dear, aroused in spite of everything. A succubus shall kiss me in a cloud Of the fabric of my freedom, and time, For all time, must hang around us like a shroud, And I do suffer this virginity As old souls enter fetuses, finally. *a phrase from a letter by Edith Wharton to Morton Fullerton
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