The Geometry & Geography of Love-Making

Memoir of a Marriage in Poetry, Part II--Erotic Love

The Personification of Geometry by Francesco De Muro CC

In celebration of April as National Poetry Month, I will be releasing over the next week or so some love poetry I wrote that has lain too long in my drawer. These comprise a memoir of my marriage captured in poetry, exploring married love in all of its manifestations: innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.

You can read Part I, Innocent Love here.

Part II, Erotic Love

Newly married and studying poetry and art in college, I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complement each other.

I loved the intricate patterns we made when making love, the way our bodies “meet and mingle,” the “lean lines” and “anxious angles,” as well as the topography of our bodies spread across the bed, the hills and valleys and vales: In short, the geometry and geography of love-making.

And I loved playing around with those images with pen and paper, metaphor and simile. It inspired the following drawing and poems.

A Pleasing Design

I find satisfaction in form,
In bare geometric patterns,
In line upon line bisecting line,
In spacious planes spread out and open.

I like this silky stretch of skin,
Simple curves and supple cones.
I like the firm feel of your flesh,
Swollen contours, anxious angles.

Mostly I like the intricate pattern
We create, stripped bare and essential,
The piling planes and lacing lines,
The way we meet and mingle, and

Intersect. When one fine ray of you
Cuts clean clean through me,
And we come to a common, and
Satisfying, point.

By Deborah J. Brasket

Since I wrote this poem, I’ve learned something of “Sacred Geometry,” which seeks to synthesize the feminine and masculine principles of the discipline.

Medieval representation personified Geometry as a seated woman surrounded by the implements of her art, as depicted in the artwork shown here.

Robert Lawlor in Sacred Geometry – Philosophy and Practice explains:

“Geometry as a contemplative practice is personified by an elegant and refined woman, for geometry functions as an intuitive, synthesizing, creative yet exact activity of mind associated with the feminine principle. But when these geometric laws come to be applied in the technology of daily life they are represented by the rational, masculine principle: contemplative geometry is transformed into practical geometry.”

I wonder if there’s a sacred geography or topography as well? In those early days, I loved exploring the otherness of my husband’s body as if traveling in a foreign land, exploring an intimate landscape with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing spaces.

Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.

In Exploration

I like the lay of your land.

You stretch before me
in large and rugged proportions.

The sheer volume of your mass
with its vast and varied landscape
is an irresistible invitation
to explore you.

You are shaped of firm and fertile earth
pressed lovingly round solid granite.

I lay my face close to smell
the sweet and salty scent of you
And there I hear
low, deep rumblings
of subterranean waters.

I trace you with my finger to find
Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests,
and parts of you so finely chiseled
I must stop and marvel.

When I touch you my hand spans continents,
for there’s no lusher garden,
no sweeter field,
no depth more resounding,
nor peak more pure
than what I find in touching you.

I rise and hover over you like a cloud
then slowly, gently, cover you with my body.
I feel the touch of skin on skin,
your warmth rising through me
and press so near I hear
Your heartbeat in my body.

I am spilling with the rich fill of you,
Knowing how all my own sweet secrets lie
Ever open to your own eager exploration.

Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye
a space so vast and distant,
and long to explore
the intangible reaches of your mind.

By Deborah J. Brasket

I’ll end this erotic part of my marriage memoir with something fun and playful, written about an interlude that took place while I was studying Samuel Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” for an early morning 18th Century British Lit exam.

An Ode: On Sex During Finals

He comes! And out the mighty fluid flows
From that strong stem whence lust doth grow
Through that soft chasm of internal space
Where ebbs and flows the tides that feed the race.
Then sinking to that warm maternal breast
He lays his listless head and finds his rest.

While she, sweet vessel, watches close the hour
Whence she must last throw off that mighty tower.
Her restless thoughts with frantic finals fraught
Can ne’er enjoy the lust that passion sought.
She rises thus to wisdom’s clarion call
Where reason rightly reigns and earthly pleasures fall.
 

Stay tuned for Part III, Disappointed Love: Love’s Duplicity

If you enjoyed this, please let me know with a like, comment, or share. As Lacan says, the primary purpose of language is to elicit response.