The Mortician's Goddaughter Versed in Lust

Just when I had long outgrown those late-night seizures in my hand, those involuntary impulses return to make my fingers twitch like the tips of twigs after the bird leaps off the branch— what a crafty little devil, bouncing back all feathered and ticklish, jittery with pleasure when it finally finds its nest. The sheets become as damp as the sweaty shirts that cling to the backs of men at the dance, and how I pity the girls who undress their lovers before sex. When I started loving other bodies instead, allowing other temporary guests to mold their shapes inside my flesh— a torso of my arm, a shoulder of my mouth, a waist or a buttock of my leg—I had no need to concentrate my rapture to a single sticky place since every movement in my skin was slowing down inside the vat of honey I was swimming in. Oh bath with tongue, oh alchemy of heat and bed. The memory of so much sex enough to keep me sated in the quieter evenings of my third and final age. So imagine my surprise when those possessions from my adolescence woke me up again, but in the guise of scribbling from my pen. Not fancy or confession but something in the middle, like the mole that snuggles in the space between my breasts, that glorious discovery that makes the men cry out, the women shudder with anticipation or intent. It's more like poetry, because it whistles through the paper like the weekend afternoons I summoned passersby from behind the window's curtain. What wonder to seduce with sound, granting serendipitous fantasy—here a table with rotating thighs, there a closet panting with exhaustion, there the eye of the voyeuristic clock bold and looking to be satisfied with one pair of feet pointing at two opposite corners of the room, three fingers always vanishing inside the cluster of four hands that motion slowly left, slowly right— the capricious current of the underwater flower, five limbs comparing lengths and flexibility, their competition sabotaged by the arrival of a sixth contender, seven escalating levels in the throat— whimper, grunt, moan, sigh, whine, hum, groan, cry—oh, and if we're lucky, thinks the grinning clock, we will spiral up the scale (and down again) a good eight times, nine would be too much to ask, though not impossible since there was once a record-breaking tenth, remember? Eleven minutes for a quickie; at least twelve positions for a marathon