ELEANOR WORMWOOD

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SEX, DEATH, & POETRY

For three years after my father died,
I wrote poems about death
his death, my death, yours
the fact that we are all going to die
the fact that we are all dying
all the time-we are born dying--
that death was everywhere
behind the picket fence
in front of the wisteria
in the piano and the mailbox
even under the pillow
and in the refrigerator
right next to the cranberry juice.

While I wrote, I thought
about Angelina Weld Grimke,
born in 1880, died in 1958,
the only child of an emancipated slave,
who graduated from Harvard Law School,
and her mother, a wealthy white woman,
who left when Angelina was very young.
Angelina taught at Dunbar High School
in Washington, D.C.
She wrote poems, plays and short stories.
She stopped writing after her father died in 1930.
She lived every day and night for 28 years
and didn't write another poem, or play, or short story.
So I wrote for Angelina and her father
and for me and for my father,
for all of us,
the dying and the dead.

And then in the fourth year,
I began writing about sex,
often while I was naked-
sex at Squaw Valley, sex at Anam Cara,
sex at Dodge, sex at Coolfont
all poetry venues, all brain sex
not having sex, just writing about it;
then sex at third base at Camden Yards,
under the waterfall at Falling Water,
in the confessional box--sin, sinner, sinnest--
behind the seafood counter,

under the dais while Orrin Hatch
(not with Orrin Hatch) gives a keynote.

Then the usual: airplanes, trains, buses,
the teeter totter, the swing,
the fourth Capitol step,
the 17th hole at Pebble Beach,
the McDonald's on the corner,
the elevator of your building,
in the house of your mother
and of my father
and finally in my own bed
and I wondered what would come next,
and who
and why
and if it would be before we died,
you and me.