.

Aphrodisiac

I.

It was past midnight when we met and spoke
One rainswept winter Friday. The wet street
Stood empty save for us (that clinched the deal).
God knows she was no beauty: unkempt, thin,
A hard-luck face—but still with youthful bloom
And amatory promise. Yes, of course
I recognized a junkie. Every girl
Who strolls the stretch from St. Mark’s to Fourteenth
Is strung out by one habit or another.

She took me to a red-brick tenement.
We climbed worn bare wood stairs into a loft
Lit with guttering candles and a lamp
That smelt of kerosene. There was no bed;
A sheeted mattress lay upon the floor.
I paid her—she disrobed and then picked up
A crumpled paper bag from off a shelf
And asked me in a supplicating tone:

Do you mind? I really need a fix.
It’s always better when I’m on the juice.
You can stay three hours if you like—
That’s about as long as my trip lasts.
I won’t be going anywhere, for sure.

.

II.

I nodded my agreement. Why object?
I hired girls for intercourse, not thought,
And didn’t care what stuff they might be on
As long as they were pliable and warm.
She emptied out the paper bag. It held
Syringe. short candle, bottlecap, a length
Of thin black rubber tubing, alcohol,
Book matches and two glassine envelopes
Of Loisaida street-grade heroin.

She mixed and cooked a dose, filled the syringe,
Uncoiled the tube and tied it round her arm
Near to the elbow, searched out a prime place,
And deftly shot up, with the cool aplomb
Of one who did it three times every day.
These were things I had not seen before
Except on Kojak episodes. My thoughts
Focused in hard and sharp exactitude:

Two hundred thousand addicts in New York—
More than enough to man four full divisions
With front-line troops, reserves, and echelons.
And yet I only know this naked girl
Twisting a tourniquet around one arm.

.

III.

In half a minute one could note the change:
Her voice grew hoarse and raspy. Words came out
Strangely untuned, and seemed to work their way
Through labyrinths of glaciated sand.
In other circumstances I’d have run,
But lust’s unerring compass steadied me.
Her breathing now was audibly profound,
And my breath caught the rhythm that she kept—
Her eyes fell shut, as if she were asleep.

Despite this trance-like state, the girl remained
Accommodating, lucid, and most calm.
She gestured toward the mattress—I lay down.
She undressed me slowly as one would
A sleepy child. We then embraced and kissed.
The trip was hers, but I hitchhiked along
To regions so unearthly with wild heat
That hell was just a suburb to their flames.

I never saw her after that one night—
The years have come and gone, as well as girls.
But none had half the sizzle of her skin
And my flesh tingles still when I recall
Those three hours with that little junkie whore.

previously published in TRINACRIA,
Issue No. 5 (Spring 2011)

.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

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22 Responses

  1. Brian A. Yapko

    Joe, I’ve now read through this brilliantly unique poem several times and although the subject matter is sordid it reads as strange and almost ethereal rather than tawdry. Because the subject matter is off-putting, it is hard on first reading to recognize it, but I have to acknowledge this as one of your best pieces. It is bravely true to life even if the subject matter is difficult. I think of the unspeakably sad painting “L’Absinthe” by Degas. Your piece is raw, painful, beautiful in a sad, seedy way. It offers a candor rare in the world of classical poetry. The observations of the speaker are insightful, personal yet detached from judgment. This is, in fact, a marvel of tone and detail. It shocked me on my first reading; on my second reading it struck me as sociologically sad; and on my third reading it struck me as a bold, courageous piece of poetry that does something profound: it tells the truth. Or, as you say, “these were things I had not seen before…”

    One major question here is where a poem like this fits into the bigger scheme of things in the literary world. You prove that no subject is too shocking or tawdry or personal that it can’t become the subject of an excellent poem. I’ve seen poems as shocking as this in free verse, but they are mere performance art — they don’t offer the depth that your blank verse does which speaks well for the classical tradition covering any emotional subject better than free verse. No one in the free verse world can come up with lines like this: “The trip was hers, but I hitchhiked along/To regions so unearthly with wild heat/That hell was just a suburb to their flames.” “Hell” as a suburb of something even hotter! That’s an astonishing image!

    I am shocked by this poem and yet I am more shocked by a poet like John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester who is well-established and respected as a classical poet despite the obscenity of some of his poems (I’m especially thinking of the blue language in his Ramble in St. James Park.) His poetry sometimes irks me as being shocking for the sake of being shocking. I find there to be a narcissistic streak to his work. But that’s not at all what your poem is like. For all the sordid subject matter, there is nothing exhbitionistic about it. It’s more clinical than sexy. You put a spotlight on a realistic scene which challenges my sense of prudery – which is my tough luck because you’re describing something that is real that we ignore at our peril. Is this not a story which deserves to be told? Will there ever be any other record of this poor strung-out prostitute in this world? You’ve given a voice to the voiceless and I think that counts for something.

    Your language is earthy, but not inorganic and tamer far than Rochester’s. If it’s offensive it’s the reality of the subject matter that is the indelicacy of the issue, not your poem. And if you want to talk about something that should be considered far more offensive: I recently re-read Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and was staggered at the matter-of-fact way the speaker describes murdering his lover. If that’s a fair subject by a poet who I hold in the highest regard, then I think Aphrodisiac is even moreso. I tend to think that anything human should be subject to discussion.

    Funny thing… If you took this identical story and recast it in ancient Rome with a centurion as the speaker and a prostitute using opium instead of heroine, it would seem far less shocking. Why is that? Because we could then regard the scene from a safe distance? That tells me that you’ve written about an encounter that is timeless. Upsetting, perhaps. But timeless.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Brian, I can’t thank you enough for these perceptive and supportive comments. This poem was written in 1980, but it has only been published once before, in an issue of my magazine TRINACRIA.

      I deliberately composed this poem in the coolest, unemotional, detached, unexcited, and non-judgmental style that I could manage. It is pure reportage and description, without a hint of condemnation or outrage or remorse or moral blather — and there isn’t a single dirty or obscene word in it.

      I owe a debt of gratitude to you and to several others here at the SCP who urged me to submit the poem.

      Reply
  2. Ben

    I haven’t read the poems Brian mentions, but between amorality and observation, observation does not glorify. When deviation occurs, observing neutrally can allow to see the cause. One way to do this is to make the event a universe itself as a focused poem can.

    When things that baffle the mind happen, a poem like this can shed light. It paves the way into neutrality when we are overwhelmed by the staggering deviation. Because it is neutral AND focused, it doesn’t fall into the sickness, nor does it cast judgement before the situation is actually ascertained.

    The poem shows black magic when people are blocked off from the divine and become sick. When people are depraved, the only divinity they can experience is black magic. When all of society is like this, we forget that it’s black magic. Observing can remind us that the divine is always there. Even the devil serves as a reminder of God. He’s found a way in, so we have to know why. And what is black magic and divine. And how to get to the latter. In this case, by positively stripping away social artifice. Otherwise, when social artifice is all of people’s mental reality, only black magic is accessible to them.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you for your comments. I did try to avoid all issues of morality or immorality precisely for the reasons you mention — namely, to present a plain biopsy slide of human behavior, without condemnation. The poem simply depicts a situation of two human beings caught up in lust, avarice, and addictive need.

      Reply
  3. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    For me this fearlessly written and powerful piece is a prime example of the wonder of the written word. The images are tangible and the potent range of emotions they have stirred have made me think deeply about the human condition. For me, the choice of narrative voice as “pure reportage and description, without a hint of condemnation or outrage or remorse or moral blather” is what I like about this poem. It invites this reader to bring her thoughts to the scene – something I am most grateful for. I love to ponder the wicked ways of the world, and your gritty and adeptly written poem challenges me to do just that. The closing stanza is especially powerful saying much more about the narrator than is matter-of-factly revealed in this brutal and beguiling poem that will haunt me long after leaving your page. Thank you, Joe.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      You’re very welcome, Susan, and I thank you too for your comments and praise. Yes, I did want to leave issues of “judgment” up to the individual reader, who could decide what to think about the story, the narrator, the girl, and the entire situation.

      Let me confess that I wanted very much to publish this old poem as a kind of object lesson to poets, and the lesson could be encapsulated in these words: Stop preaching and exhorting the reader. Stop pushing sectarian agendas. Stop proselytizing. Stop speechifying. You can do all of those things in specifically satirical and political poems (and we at the SCP do it very well indeed), but please allow for poems that are purely observational and distanced, and which give the reader the right to enter the fictive artifact as a simple observer.

      Let me also express my thanks to you and Mike for the encouragement and coaxing that you both gave me. It was a difficult decision to submit this poem.

      Reply
  4. ABB

    This is a really fresh piece. Can’t remember ever reading something quite like it. I loved it from beginning to end, and the final lines are incredible. ‘Little junkie whore’ is a bold and powerful closing phrase.

    I’d echo Brian’s observation that I’ve read stuff of this vein in free verse, but the emphasis there always seems more to be about celebrating a perverse lifestyle in a shocking way that doesn’t really notice anything. In formal verse, a topic like this always seems to fall into either the Anacreontic love of revelry, or the satirical camp ala Juvenal. It takes a lot of skill to take a clear-eyed view on this.

    I’d personally like to see more poems in this vein on the site. When liberals make fun of ‘conservative art,’ they always focus on its unsubtle sentimental qualities—and they’re not wrong. Jon McNaughton’s artwork that’s gone viral on social media is a case in point. Poems like this prove that conservatives are capable of creating art that’s just as good as anything else in the tradition, without being labeled as tediously reactionary.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Many thanks, Andrew. I’ll reveal something about that last line: my mentor, the late Alfred Dorn, begged me to omit it, saying that the poem would never be published if I left it in or did not alter it. My decision to leave it unchanged is one of the very few times I disregarded Dorn’s advice. I’m glad I did.

      Free-verse poems dealing with sex are almost always in the grip of leftist ideology, and therefore are celebrational or pro-perversity. And yes, many modern formal poems on the subject do fall into revelry or satire.

      I agree heartily that too much formal poetry today tends toward the sentimental, the conventionally pious, the blandly patriotic, and the tendency towards child-friendliness and “family values.” It is a tremendous weakness that the left easily lampoons.

      Reply
  5. James Sale

    Very, very accomplished writing; the bird’s eye view of the whole process, including the detachment even of the lust, and the accumulation of details through a diction that is rich and varied – “A hard-luck face—but still with youthful bloom
    And amatory promise” – mix of Anglo-Saxon with Latinate language – with a sinewy syntax that snakes through the details it exemplifies. It’s a mini-epic into hell with the Titaness Mnemosyne recalling – savouring – it all in memory, and caught where one wants to be!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      James, praise from a master such as yourself is deeply gratifying. My sincerest thanks!

      I do tend to mix Latinate and Anglo-Saxon diction in my poetry, and believe it or not, I got savage abuse for doing so when I was in a poetry workshop back in the 1970s. You’d think I had committed high treason for daring to put a Latin derivative in an English sentence, and I was constantly mocked for it. Eventually I just left the workshop in disgust.

      Reply
  6. Paul A. Freeman

    The only work I’ve read as visceral as this before, is in 1984, when Winston Smith writes in his diary about an encounter with a prostitute in one of the poorer prole districts. It’s extremely vivid and affecting.

    Thanks for the read.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Paul, I remember that scene. Winston picks the woman up, pays her the small sum she asks, has sex with her, and it is only during the act that he realizes she is very old. But he continues and finishes the act nonetheless. I was a teenager when I read the book, and that scene was “vivid and affecting,” as you say.

      Reply
  7. Julian D. Woodruff

    A distinctive and arresting poem. How would most write such a scene today? I think using 1st and 2nd person, and in present tense. Placing the narrative in past tense and using 3rd person would rob it of the immediacy and visceral quality that most would seek. The point of relying on narrative distance seems to elude a lot of writers these days. In fact, I’d guess many would assume this piece was out of the past at least as much from its way with tense and person as from the use of blank verse.
    But, to change my tack, could a poem to similar effect also be written in rhyme? Do any examples to mind, anyone?

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Julian, thank you for your thoughts on my poem. I do in fact use first person (both “I” and “we”) in places where the narrator speaks or thinks, and where reference is made to both himself and the girl. Third person is saved for comments about the girl.

      A reader would not think of this poem as being very far back in the past, because of the allusions to a TV show (“Kojak”), the streets of lower Manhattan (“St. Mark’s to Fourteenth”) and a brand of street heroin (“Loisaida”).

      Rhyme would not work in a poem of this type. It would hamper the poet’s ability to choose the exact and perfect word for his description and thoughts; it would paint him into syntactical corners; and it would detract from the tone of heaviness and grittiness that the subject matter demands.

      I don’t say that rhyme cannot be used in serious and dark poems — obviously it can, and has done so countless times. But sometimes rhyme is a hindrance in a poem when the details are too important to be fiddled with.

      Reply
      • Julian D. Woodruff

        Thanks for your response, Joseph. On person and tense I should have been clearer: I meant only to contrast the “she and I were/did …” choice of your poem with what seems much more characteristic of the latest in narration–the “you and I are/do …” (disregarding scenic details that help to set the date approximately).

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        I see what you mean, Julian. I too have noticed a tendency in contemporary poets to avoid any tense except the simple present. I really don’t know what the hell is wrong with these poets — did nothing ever happen in the past, or the distant past? Will nothing ever happen in the future? Have these poets even heard of the subjunctive?

        Another poet wrote to me to suggest that this is the result of the contemporary fixation on immediate communication via smart phones, and on texting. This (he argues) creates a shallow hic-et-nunc mentality that pays no attention to anything but the current moment.

  8. Adam Sedia

    I think this piece among the many of yours I’ve read comes closest to the aesthetic you espouse in your polemic writing: plain-spoken, vivid, direct, not afraid of taboos. Leftist free-verse poets are always yammering about being “daring” and “subversive” when all they do is parrot the elite ideology du jour. What you give us is really a “daring” and “subversive” work — a story of a tryst with a hooker presented from the john’s perspective, who remembers it fondly, with no remorse. All done in deft rhyme and meter, too!

    There is no moralizing, but I can detect a subtle moral message (if I read correctly): the john treats the hooker as an object of pleasure and remembers her only what she did for him, even though it came at the cost of her health, sanity — and likely life. “I hired girls for intercourse, not thought” points us in this direction. Subtlety is always key.

    There are some great turns of phrase in here, too: “glaciated sand,” “hell was just a suburb to their flames,” and the almost shockingly graphic “lust’s unerring compass.” This is a great work.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you, Adam — I’m moved by your kind and perceptive words. I always thought of this piece as one of my best and most important, along with my religious poems about the crucifixion, or the tortures of St. Anthony, but no editors (not even editors of formal and metrical verse magazines) had the guts to take it in a po-biz world that brags about being “daring” and “on the edge.” The poem sat for over thirty years in my files until I published it myself in TRINACRIA.

      Yes, a moral point can be gleaned from the poem, even if it is only an indirect warning. The speaker is driven by lust, and is not concerned with the girl’s addicted condition; the girl is driven by avarice for gain, and by her need for a heroin high; and neither one has any thought beyond these mundane concerns. Their vices come in handy for each other, which is the engine of all prostitution.

      Reply
  9. Shamik Banerjee

    Such a poem defines excellence. Meticulously constructed and it almost seems like a short film revealing the plot screen by anxious screen to the audience. I like such poems. I don’t know the genre, but deep inside, I know I possess an affinity towards such poems that only present the scenes, allowing its readers to wring their own meaning out of it. Or maybe, there’s no need for a meaning. Such a poem is a journey to its characters’ souls; what they do, how they do, and why they do it; almost like an unforgettable short film that only shows us and leaves the rest to us! Thanks for this Mr. Salemi. I would like to see more of your works in this line: poems that narrate short instances! Thank you!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Shamik, thank you for your praise and your comments. I don’t think there is a special genre into which this poem fits. It is a mix of dramatic monologue, strophic interaction, and straightforward narrative. The direct quotations (in italics) are of the girl’s words and the speaker’s interior thoughts.

      Yes, it is “scenic,” as in a film. And I avoid “meaning, message, and morals” in the poem, as I generally try to do. I just wanted to present a slice of life, in all its plainness.

      You touch upon an important point that is too often ignored by those of us to who are dedicated to formal, metrical verse in the English tradition. We are trained in the techniques of rhetoric: the tropes and figures, the levels of diction, the use of allusion to past texts, and of course the complexities of rhyme and meter. All of that is wonderful, and it is what we have employed our craft to achieve. But on some occasions rhetoric cannot be glaringly obvious, but must be very low-key and unobtrusive. This is often required when dealing with “low” subjects, where the higher levels of rhetoric can seem out of place, or even ridiculous.

      Your comment about a short film, where the plot is revealed “screen by anxious screen” to the audience, is a good description of this poem.

      Reply
  10. Joshua C. Frank

    Wow… just, wow. Everything you write is really good, and this is no exception. As you know, I list you as one of my influences, and anyone reading this can see why.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Joshua, I’m so glad I took this poem out of the files, and I’m glad that I listened to Brian Yapko and Susan and Mike Bryant, who convinced me that it needed to be published. I’m also very glad that it has pleased you.

      Reply

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