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Fuck -- Kim Addonizio

 
(Poem #241)Fuck
 There are people who will tell you
 that using the word fuck in a poem
 indicates a serious lapse
 of taste, or imagination,
 
 or both. It’s vulgar,
 indecorous, an obscenity
 that crashes down like an anvil
 falling through a skylight
 
 to land on a restaurant table,
 on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
 But if you were sitting
 over coffee when the metal
 
 hit your saucer like a missile,
 wouldn’t that be the first thing
 you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back
 shouting, or at least thinking it,
 
 over and over, bell-note riotously clanging
 in the church of your brain
 while the solicitous waiter
 led you away, wouldn’t you prop
 
 your shaking elbows on the bar
 and order your first drink in months,
 telling yourself you were lucky
 to be alive? And if you wouldn’t
 
 say anything but Mercy or Oh my
 or Land sakes, well then
 I don’t want to know you anyway
 and I don’t give a fuck what you think
 
 of my poem. The world is divided
 into those whose opinions matter
 and those who will never have
 a clue, and if you knew
 
 which one you were I could talk
 to you, and tell you that sometimes
 there’s only one word that means
 what you need it to mean, the way
 
 there’s only one person
 when you first fall in love,
 or one infant’s cry that calls forth
 the burning milk, one name
 
 that you pray to when prayer
 is what’s left to you. I’m saying
 in the beginning was the word
 and it was good, it meant one human
 
 entering another and it’s still
 what I love, the word made
 flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one
 whose lovely body I want close,
 
 and as we fuck I know it’s holy,
 a psalm, a hymn, a hammer
 ringing down on an anvil,
 forging a whole new world.

-- Kim Addonizio