scarecrow poetics/essays

I’ll take with me to the grave the way your
dark brown eyes sparkled and smiled up at me
thru unruly black curls as your barely
seventeen-year-old mouth gleefully sucked
on my twenty-nine-year-old dick
with surprising skill and testicle-lapping
daring well beyond your years,

as well the excitement I could feel rumbling thru
every part of you the first time I pulled your panties
to one side and reciprocated with my tongue …

Shit, I’ll take it all with me!—

The hours of kissing and caressing in which we engaged,
before and in between fucking sessions; the long talks
we had on books and politics and just about everything
else under the sun; the time we spent just lying in bed
watching movies or TV; the amazing way you would
hang around my apartment naked, cooking, reading,
or whatever, apparently never even thinking about
putting your clothes on again until you had to
go somewhere; the cute way you’d giggle and
scream when I would unexpectedly slap your
bare butt while you walked across a room;
the strange guilty pang I’d always feel
when you did or said something that made me
realize that no matter how smart or unusually
mature you were for your age, you were still
a very young girl indeed …

Yes, I’ll take all this with me and more—for these
many years later I’m finally realizing that of all the women
who have flown from my life you’re the one I miss most:

because though I may have loved others longer
and more powerfully, you were the one I loved most
simply, with the least amount of thought or need
for understanding or justification

And because of this, the pain of your departure
still exists deep within me; I still can sometimes relive
with sad accuracy the day you told me, without warning
it seemed, that you didn’t want to grow up this fast,
that you wanted to be a teenage girl for a bit longer …

The irony of course is that within a year you were
knocked up by a guy five years your senior and were
forced to grow up much faster than you ever would
have had to with a dreamer poet of
arrested adolescence such as me …

I’m not sure why this has all come back to me
so strongly as of late—but the truth is that suddenly
I’ve been wishing more than a little bit that I would
have been the guy who left the condoms in the drawer
and that I now had an eleven-year-old son, some sort of
relationship with you still, and a life very different
from the one that’s led me to the warm nostalgia
of this lonely poem to you.

Robert Woodard © 2007.