Sex and Suffering.

I don't typically post poetry unless I have a busy mind, so I guess I'm busy trying to organize the next few months in my mind. I love this poem, so, for your reading pleasure, Tony Hoagland's "Self-Improvement":

Just before she flew off like a swan

to her wealthy parents' summer home,

Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to

improve his expertise at oral sex, 

and offered him some technical advice:

use nothing but his tongue tip

to flick the light switch in his room 

on and off a hundred times a day

until he grew fluent at the nuances

of force and latitude.

Imagine him at practice every evening,

more inspired than he ever was by algebra,

beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,

thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,

seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,

the quadratic equation of her climax

yield to the logic

of his simple math.

Maybe he unscrewed

the bulb from his apartment ceiling

so that the passerby would not believe

a giant firefly was pulsing

its electric abdomen in 3b.

Maybe, as he stood

two inches from the wall,

in darkness, fogging the old plaster

with his breath, he visualized the future

as a mansion rising from the hillside

of the shore that he was rowing to

with his tongue's exhausted oar.

Of course the girlfriend dumped him:

met someone apres-ski, who,

using nothing but his nose,

could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.

Sometimes we are asked 

to get good at something we have no talent for,

or excel at something we will never 

have the opportunity to prove.

Often we ask ourselves

to make absolute sense

out of what just happens

and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering, 

which everybody practices,

but strangely few of us

grow graceful in.

The climaxes of suffering are complex, 

costly, beautiful, but secret.

Bruce never played the light switch again.

So the avenues we walk down, 

full of bodies wearing faces, 

are full of hidden talent:

enough to make pianos moan,

sidewalks split,

streetlights deliriously flicker.