Ekstasis

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Ekstasis

One end the remote past and the other the remote future, all ever to disembark this train enter into the station of eternity at once. 

1

She wash-clothed her goosey region and burst
for the kitchen to quiet the hunger barks
so as not to get shit about chores undone.
Bent into the cupboard, she was scooping kibble 
when the pit-bull terrier ran its snout just right 
into the nude spread of her teensy rear.
The cold of the pink nose shocked her system.
“Like it, Tricks?” she asked, rising around.
Ear stiff, the dog tilted its head and barked once. 
“Got it good, see?” were her mons-jutted words
as she parted lips blue-vein pale, unveiling 
the same pink that edged the dog’s mouth.

She was caught up inspecting for herself
when Tricks stole a lap. “Hey there mister! 
What do you think you’re doing with that?”
But the menthol cold cream for the shave
had her much more hot and bothered, apulse, 
than the old conditioner approach. Possessed, 
and pearly papillae enflamed as they become
on a starving tongue tasting pomegranate,
she clawed out a glob of chunky peanut butter
and slathered it into rosebud holes, muting 
the icy burn. Missionary on cold terrazzo tile,
she took the cleaning by the tropical tongue,
aware of the deep buzz within of ovulation.
Her blonde head fell hard on the floor. Dizzy,
she gave in to the mons feast of slobber. 

Along with the sheer taboo of the act
and that parents were due home any minute,
not tensing against the risk of being bitten
made the pulsing pleasure overwhelming.
Galloping out of her pelvic-thrusting body,  
she slapped on more and more of the chunk
in a frenzy that triggered frenzy in Tricks
(thought by the household too dumb to learn any).
Black nails untrimmed swelling the cold space 
with slipping clicks, the dog snap-snapped at spray
with the chomps of hose play, those throaty sounds
of the Hebrew Chaim: “Hahyim, Hahyim, Hayhim.”
 
2

Both got a treat and no one was hurt
she thought later that night when mother,
preparing father’s next-day PB&J, 
called out: “What’s with the peanut butter?” 

Anyway, she was just a new teen then,
a little sex crazed as is not uncommon
with all those hormones coursing.
Is it so unusual for a little girl 
to get herself with a curling iron,
pushing the limit on the speculum?
Is it so unusual for a little girl
to race to rub herself off at the window 
as father walks up the driveway
about to enter a field of lamb scent?
Is it so unusual for a little girl
to fantasize about him as she does, 
hand around her neck, taking her?
Is it so unusual for a little girl
to grind against girls, objects, animals,
and to keep on despite mother’s beatings?
Is it so unusual for a little girl 
to let the dog sniff and lick around, 
pulled in by that universal gaminess?  

Yes, in her twenties she intended to have 
an orgasmic childbirth, a birth climax.
But if the conception was so pleasurable
why not try to have the birthing be?
And yes, she did in fact receive The Gift,
that out-of-body in the release of that body. 
Hunkered down and rocking over the afghan,
bald-goosey-oiled vulva fanning and splitting, 
full-body orgasms tripling with contractions,
gestation revealing itself to have been foreplay,
she was overcome with supreme empowerment,
primitive oxytocin rapture of oneness with all.
The same pelvic thrusting of the last out-of-body,
and all the other minor thrustings after that point,
delivered the body out of her, and delivered her 
sobbing, once again, to spiritual transcendence:
“More more more. Oh God, yes!”

Besides, she was a good mother. Sure, she did pay 
a prostisciutto to be with her down-syndrome son,
boar-grunting in the next room with each thrust.
But why could he not enjoy being loved by a man 
like he wanted? Anyway, she was a caring citizen,
a charity-giving, fund-raising lady who lunches.
An exemplar engineer in her working days,
she went beyond codes and standards of practice
when she felt that these failed to protect the public.
She went beyond preventative ethics, in fact.
She innovated, sacrificed, to enhance humanity:
the low-flow sink and toilet, the free services.

3

She has told herself these things in the quiet times
(not once helping whatever case she was building
by admitting, accepting, her master as master). 

But to her horror, a horror without analogy,
she was unable to voice them as an appeal—
an appeal she found herself desperate to make 
during her last and most trembling ekstasis.
Before a full-circle rainbow that took her back
to memory of its approximation at Niagara Falls, 
all she was able to do was receive the cry 
so penetrating that it had to come from within,
but so booming, so masculine, so adventitious, 
that it had to come from something alien. 
“BE GONE FROM ME, YE CURSÉD!”

She could manage only a howl in response
to the feel of being cracked open like axe wood,
to the feel of being then cast away, jilted—even
her clothes, torn from her, got to stay behind
as her naked soul dropped. Charred lilies
falling, her arms stretched to unwrinkled parents
not seen in years, as well as to her husband 
next to them, embraced by them, even though 
he had just been caressing her sickbed hand.
Overcome with the most intense rejection
at having been instantaneously forgotten,
at the collective turning of the back on her,
the dropping down felt so real—except that
there was no resistance, no medium. A sword
red with lily-burning heat swelled above. Against 
the looping backdrop of Hahyims and boar-grunts,
so clear was the “What’s with the peanut butter?”
and the moans of “More more more. Oh God yes.”

* “Ekstasis” is an ekphrastic poem inspired by The Last Judgment, Hans Memling’s 15th century triptych. The poem concerns primarily the right panel.

The poem originally appeared in Former People (2017).