Twenty-Eight Young Men and Me

I probably watched too many movies with romantic love scenes where a couple is curled up together reading poetry (what movies were these–I don’t know, maybe just the ones in my own head?), because poetry figured largely in my imaginings about sex/marriage. The reason might be that poetry was where I’d first found expressions of the inexplicable sexual longings that I experienced. I was a high school sophomore when I found Walt Whitman’s words and discovered someone who knew what it was like to feel turned-on constantly and who wasn’t hesitant to admit that he saw sex in the crotch and vine of every tree. My favorite poem of his was the one below, because he was telling my story:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly dres’t aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I can’t remember the last time that I read poetry with my husband–although we do often listen to music and connect via the lyrics, which is *almost* like poetry. Do you ever read poetry with your partner? Do you have a favorite erotic poem that you’d like to share?