Sanctuary

I began to explore the personal through poetry in 1985 at the age of 37. That this coincided almost exactly with my coming out as a lesbian hardly seems like a random occurrence. To paraphrase Gertrude: getting down to essence is getting down to essence. My poetry has appeared in Radiance Magazine, GirlSpeak – an anthology of poems from the GirlSpeak poetry reading series at the Knitting Factory in New York City – and in Sisters Singing: Incantations, Blessings, Chants, Prayers, Art and Sacred Stories by Women due out Summer, 2006 from Wild Girl Publishing. I am currently at work on a collection of poems called Trial & Error.

Sanctuary appeared in Issue 3 of Trivia: Voices of Feminism

Your perfect breasts:
their beauty–
which includes the scars
from lump removal
and its aftermath–
brush across my body.
You present them to me
like an altar
you yourself have tended
all these years
while you wondered
when the worshippers would come.
I make my offerings
with hands and lips–
the whole of me
in passionate devotion.
You grace me
with the richness
of your pleasure.
Your sounds and smells–
the crackling electricity
that passes from your body
into mine
then back again–
infuse me with
your blessing.
I am Born Again
each time I leave your bed.

Working notes

It was a great gift to me that TRIVIA announced an issue that would be exploring desire and love between woman. I am a firm believer in the healing and transformative power of lesbian love relationships and that there is a qualitative difference between lesbian love and heterosexual love. (Having no experience with desire among men, I can’t speak to it with as much certainty. However, knowing that both partners are burdened with the issues peculiar to men, I can hazard a guess.) I had already written “Sanctuary” and hoped that it might be accepted for publication.

The first draft of Sanctuary began as the idea for the poem began: “In a reverie / I see your perfect breasts…” At the outset, I didn’t know that an erotic poem was about to be born or that the writing would bring me to the extraordinary awareness of the intersection between the erotic and the sacred. The poem flowed much as lovemaking flows, with a rhythm all its own, the movements at once actions and reactions. Because I was writing a lived experience, as with all my poems, I simply dropped down to the place of the experience and opened to it, casting about for the words that described what I was experiencing and reeling them in. Revisions to this poem involved stripping away those things that served as my door in – as with the original opening line. Removing what amounts to those back-and-forth rockings the young girls do before they jump into the double-dutch ropes brings the poem into the actual experience as opposed to the memory of the experience. It’s the jumping that’s the fun part.

The sanctity and beauty of my lover, as embodied in her breasts which had endured the excision of a malignant tumor and sentinel node; the radiation and adhesions; the trauma to the whole body from the surgery, the year of chemotherapy, and a lifetime of anti-cancer hormone therapy; and the psychic wounding from being forced to face the prospect of a terrible death like the ones of so many of her friends to which she had borne witness: I summed this up in the lines “their beauty / which includes the scars / from lump removal / and its aftermath.” For those of us who know breast cancer, the “aftermath” is loaded with meaning on all levels from the purely medical to the deeply spiritual. For those of us – few as they may be – with no direct experience either as patient, caregiver, or friend, I felt that the word “aftermath” took up little enough real estate in the poem to not be too much of a bother.