Last night, by my front door, my box of books
arrived from Amazon: How to Do Your Own Divorce
in California, and two other books:
one on vaginal fisting, and the other book
Kimba the White Lion, a video whose script formed
the basis for The Lion King. (Okay. One’s a video. I lied. Book
me.) My son’s books
don’t know the first
thing about morality. But Kimba does. He was the first
creature I wanted to be other than myself, long before books
gave me Charlotte in her Web, the Amazons. Kimba showed
me the fist
was not the mightiest organ. Rather the brain, though barely
larger than a fist
can be subtler and more effective. Fist-
ing (I know this from more than books)
is effective because the fist
fills the vaginal space like the head of a baby, whose fist
clenching & unclenching will tease a mother’s nipple to
embarrassed life, to divorce
from its role as sexual. Or not. Depending on decisions
mental (not moral). The fist
can make breasts as tender as a pregnancy or a baby’s fist-
of-a-suck. Which hurts. Make no mistake about it (These
basics form
the basis for all other oral and tactile and carnal forms
of pleasure whether mawed, mauled, sacrificial, superficial,
penetrating or, indeed, fist-
ed, and are at least at first
painful to one partner, though they may later feel
voluptuous). Just as first-
born children are notorious for being a mixed blessing. How first
you crack the egg, then you scramble it. Take fist-
ing. The first
time you come, you may cry, scream, bleed. A first
page warning in A Hand in the Bush, my new book
on fisting, proclaims that a casual fist can kill. A first
chapter covers latex, safe sex, cautiousness. I
hate this book. If asked by a new partner or
a good friend, I would say first
“Fisting is mental, not moral. Who cares how many
fingers get inside? Divorce
teleology from terminology. Sex from sense.” Divorce
one idea from another idea, one book from another,
though they may at first
arrive in the same box like twins. Form
binds. Form combines. Form liberates. Form
a marriage and the stiff form
of all heterosexual culture will fall on you like
starch. The first
love affair contains the form
of every love after. Is probably the mother. The form-
al principle states that symmetry is more beautiful than a
lopsided, singular pattern. Yet Shiva bears a fist
on one side, a palm on the other. Perhaps opposites form
a kind of symmetry also. The singular form
of a woman is lush, bushy, marvelous. But a woman, whose
bankbook
has run low on funds, her home to be sold at auction, is booked
on the foreclosure form
posted in the foyer as “Ms. Myra Hill, an unmarried woman.” So
I wonder whether divorce
is truly un-marriage, or another thing altogether: Divorce:
a state of altered being, transformational, like the trinity of ice,
water and steam. Divorce
me. Will I be an “unmarried” then? Formally single? Singular?
The trick is not to form
needless connections in the first place, nor tense muscles you
do not need to use. Divorc-
ing tricks the mind into thinking you can unscramble eggs. Diverse
sources say maybe you can. I’d like first
to try out divorce
from a perspective divorced
from civilization, unification. Clarification: Is the nude
beautiful because we imagine a symmetry, a pair of eyes
watching her? Her counterpart, a fist,
as if nudity were always in dialogue. I think I’ll never fist
again, if it must be as the book
says: latex, safe sex, disconnections. I could write the book.
Marriage creates something larger. A fist
Is more than the bent bodies of fingers. At first,
It’s a little like creating a baby: marriage forms
A third life form, an Us. Intimacy, also, is a book
read slowly. A lover looking down at a lover’s fist
Rising like a baby in her pubic cavity can hold the form
Of two (or one) long enough, to divorce
Here from now, there from later. Divorce
Is the word you don’t write in Holy Books,
An arithmetic you cannot scribble with a fist
Of fingers. Divisible yet indivisible. An order of books
from Amazon. Why use more fingers than fit. At first.
This poem first appeared on Hooksexup in 2001.