Classic Poem

Over dinner we talk about what we wouldn't eat as kids: garlic, olives, but also mashed potatoes & peas (one who refused spaghetti until her twenties), while at the other end they're talking about fetishes, fuzzies who dress in animal outfits, those people who get off watching the elderly do it; what about the porn shop we stumbled into (says another), the pink door with a hand sticking its cigarette out into the street; & then all at once we're discussing the forked penises of snakes, the long penises of horses, the cork-screw penises of pigs, kinds & forms of penetration that might make even bestiality comprehensible; so under the circumstances it's natural she mentions her boyfriend who as a child refused to eat fruit or talk to girls but who found girls eating fruit irresistable; who has grown to a man who loves not only devouring fruit but also watching it, how its bodies are quite like our own, a sleek lime, an ample orange, especially (she says) he loves to have a beautiful pear on hand during sex beside them on the bed, how he holds it then gives it to her to smell too, maybe both taking a bite; & how one time she took some fruit to class to show her drawing students the variegated skins, what a challenge to a painter to capture the shifting light; & as she was holding up a grapefruit, turning it in her hands (the dimpled rind, the indentation of the navel, the top a little flatter than the sides), just then she noticed the bite marks, the imprint of his teeth on the waxy surface (& then she remembered that night, she did indeed); how then & there, lecturing to her class, she'd started to laugh, certain they all thought her insane.