The Irish say your trouble is their
trouble and your
joy their joy? I wish
I could believe it;
I am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m Irish.
— Spencer Island.
* * *
Poets are some of the worse fucks you can imagine. If they’re not whining about the impossibility of sacred love they’re so desperate for acceptance they’ll sleep with almost anything. Hey, I might be a poetry groupie but at least I have my standards: I never let Allen Ginsberg’s syphilitic cock anywhere near me.
I met Marianne Moore by a wonderful coincidence. It was 1935, right after she had won the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine but before she won the Pulitzer. She was 48 and I was 14 though I told her I was 16 to avoid getting her arrested for “lewd and criminal behavior” and “corrupting a minor.” Socrates committed suicide for less and I didn’t want to go down in history as the boy who got one of the greatest poets of the century arrested.
Everyone knew Marianne had lovers but no one talked about it. It was 1935, according to popular opinion the clitoris had yet to be invented, let alone the female orgasm.
“Of course I fuck,” she had told a scandalized William Carlos Williams. Here’s the epitome of hypocrite: a “ladies’ home doctor” Willie would put his cock into any patient he could drug into oblivion but get a woman who kept her clothes on and uses phrases like “clapped-out cunt cakes” in her poetry and suddenly we have a Biblical prophet casting the menstruating women from the temple. America can forgive any rapist provided he’s good at some sort of art but it rarely forgives any artist for being some sort of woman.
At first we exchanged pleasantries, her apartment being two floors up from where I lived with my parents. That’s one thing Ginsberg and Moore had in common: lust for pre-pubescent boys. I was a little worried she might not care for me, the first signs of puberty just starting, but she laughed over her vodka and opium and said a cock in need is a friend indeed. I never knew what she meant by that but all those summer morning I spent in her living room with her made me feel close on a level that we both understood.
I guess Marianne was receptive to what I had to say too, since we sat for hours on her sofa, “sucking face,” as she would put it. As a bohemian poet, shameless wanton and contributor to the Partisan Review, she said she had certain maternal feelings toward me that milk and cookies just couldn’t satisfy and so often sat next to me with her shirt unbuttoned to her waist, her small breasts with those otherworldly nipples of hers, long and thin, pressed hard against my mouth.
How many of us, male or female, straight or gay or somewhere in the wild spectrum of sexuality and desire, can say they’ve made a major literary master, one of the sacred bards of 20th Century Modernism, cum over and over? Often, my trouser undone, my boy cock pointing to the ceiling, I would fall to my knees in front of Marianne, let her pull her skirt to her hips and tongue her wet delicious cunt over and over and over. There is not one professor in all of the English departments in America who can say they really know what Marianne Moore’s motivations were and yet they somehow still keep their jobs. Curious.
What few photographs of Marianne that survive do not lie about some things: she was a small woman with dark hair and dark eyes. Once she confided in me that the reason she loved young boys was that you could get them to do nearly anything your twisted, sex-hungry heart wanted while with grown men it was always an uphill battle to even touch you, let alone see how many fingers you could get up her ass.
“And look at American men,” she’d moan, in-between swallowing, yet again, one more orgasm I unleashed down her throat. “Most look like beached whales and want to be told they are sex gods. Why bother with shit like that?”
Marianne would cum violently and often. Sometimes, when she was stoned on opium, she’d get on her hands and knees and look over your shoulder slyly: “you’re gonna put that where?” and we’d both giggle as the tip of my cock slowly began to push itself into the puckered rosebud of her ass.
Somehow it came up while we were chatting about how much a douchebag Ezra Pound was, what with him smugly telling the world that fascism was going to be great for the Jews of Europe, that she had met a younger poet, some odd duck named Elizabeth Bishop, at a party the other night and what would I think if she brought her over so I could see which poet’s cunt tasted better?
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Have you tasted her yet?”
Marianne smiled and said she had already had an encounter with the younger woman at a shindig being held at the Museum of Modern Art. It was on the third floor bathroom where smiles and the nods led to kisses, followed by Elizabeth running her hand down Marianne’s thigh. The older woman brought her fingers to her new conquest’s clit, and they stood there, kissing, with their hands down each other’s skirts. Marianne laughed and said that when Elizabeth orgasmed she filled her hand with girl cum, which Marianne brought to her mouth to lick dry.
Of course Marianne wrote all this down. It is there in her poetry if you bother to look. Or, should I say, it was, until the puritans who run Poetry Magazine refused to publish her poems until she took out anything “of a suggestive or lewd nature pertaining to woman-kind.”
“What can you do?” Marianne sighed. “There is no point in being a poet if you can’t publish. So I changed the ending to this poem. What do you think, darling boy?”
It was a wonderful poem, complex and demanding and ended: “I am troubled, I’m dissatisfied, I’m a cock sucker.”
“I love it,” I said, grinning back at her, “but America will never forgive you for being honest.”
“I know,” my lover sighed. “But what am I going to do? The last thing a poet will ever be, I fear, is honest.”
