Erotic Passage of the Day

[Daisy]

Beautiful passage, Matthew. Here's another . . .

From “Les Fleurs” (1981), by Thomas Ligotti

With ecstasy and exasperation, I here record a particular episode from Day’s and my tropical sojourn. I’m not sure whether the following adventure represents an impasse or a turning point in the course of our relationship. Perhaps there is some point that I have failed to entirely get. As yet I am, not surprisingly, in the dark. Here, nevertheless, is a fragment from our escapist interlude.

An Hawaiian paradise at midnight. Actually we were just gazing upon the beachside luxuriance from our hotel veranda. Day was bemused by several exotic drinks that wore flowers on their foamy heads. I was in a condition similar to hers. A few moments of heady silence passed, punctuated by an occasional sigh from Day. We heard the flapping of invisible wings whipping the warm air in darkness. We listened closely to the sounds of black orchids growing, even if there were none. “Mmmm,” hummed Day. We were ripe for a whim. I had one, not knowing yet if I could pull it thoroughly off. “Can you smell the mysterious cereus?” I asked, placing one hand on her far shoulder and dramatically passing the other in a horizontal arc before the jungle beyond. “Can you?” I hypnotically repeated. “I can,” said a game Day. “But can we find them, Day, and watch them open in the moonlight?” “We can, we can,” she chanted giddily. We could. Suddenly the smooth-skinned leaves of the night garden were brushing against our smooth-skinned selves. Day paused to touch a flower that was orange or red but smelled of a deep violet. I encouraged us to press on across the flower-bedded earth. We plunged deeper into the dream garden. Faster, faster, faster the sounds and smells rushed by us. It was easier than I thought. At some point, with almost no effort at all, I successfully managed our full departure from known geography. “Day, Day,” I shouted in the initial confusion and excitement. “We’re here. I’ve never shown this to anyone. It’s been such a torturous secret, Day. I’ve wanted to tell you for so long, and show you. No, don’t speak. Look, look.” Oh, the thrill of seeing this dark paradise with new eyes. With doubled intensity would I now see my world. My world. She was somewhere near me in the darkness. I waited, seeing her a thousand ways in my mind before actually gazing at the real Day. I looked. “What’s wrong with the stars, the sky?” was all she said. She was trembling.

[Ligeia]

“You’ve just turned 82. You are still beautiful, graceful and desirable. We’ve lived together now for 58 years and I love you more than ever. Lately I’ve fallen in love with you all over again and I once more carry inside me a gnawing emptiness that can only be filled by your body snuggled up against mine. At night I sometimes see the figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It’s you the hearse is carrying away. I don’t want to be there for your cremation; I don’t want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. Each of us would like not to survive the other’s death. We’ve often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we’d like to spend it together.”

Andre Gorz - Histoire d’un Amour

[paeng]

"my sweet old etcetera"

http://lovepoems.yu-hu.com/cummings/..._etcetra.shtml

[paeng]

And from the always reliable Nabokov, the opening lines of Lolita:

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/...o_excerpt.html

[Bleak&Icy]

"Body of a Woman" by Pablo Neruda (trans. W. S. Merwin)

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of a woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

[Daisy]

“Passionate Women” (1936), by Cesare Pavese (trans. Geoffrey Brock)

The girls go down to the water at dusk,
as the sea fades and lies calm. Each leaf
trembles as they emerge from the woods, cautious,
onto the sand, to sit by the water. The froth
plays its restless games, the shore stretching away.

The girls are afraid of the seaweed buried
beneath waves: it clings to legs and shoulders,
any bare skin. They scramble back to the beach,
calling friends’ names, peering behind them.
Even the shadows on the seabed, in this light,
grow huge, they seem to be shifting uneasily,
as if drawn to the bodies above them. The woods,
at sunset, can be a haven more peaceful
than the rock beach, but the dark girls enjoy
sitting out in the open on a pale sheet.

They huddle together, wrapping the sheet
around their legs, regarding the calm sea
like a meadow at twilight. Would any girl dare
lie naked now in a meadow? The seaweed,
brushing her feet, would suddenly rise
to seize and surround her shuddering body.
There are eyes in the sea; sometimes they gleam.

That foreign woman, who would swim at night
alone and naked, even in the moonless dark,
disappeared one night and never came back.
She was big, and must have been dazzling white
for those eyes at the bottom of the sea to have seen her.

[Viva June]

An erotic-dream-puppet passage from Thomas Pynchon's V.:

Mélanie dreamed. The lay figure hung half off the bed, its arms stretched out, crucified, one stump touching her breast. It was the sort of dream in which, possibly, the eyes are open: or the last vision of the room is so reproduced in memory that all details are perfect, and the dreamer is unclear whether he is asleep or awake. The German stood over the bed watching her. He was Papa, but also a German.

"You must turn over," he repeated insistently. She was too embarrassed to ask why. Her eyes—which somehow she was able to see, as if she were disembodied and floating above the bed, perhaps somewhere behind the quicksilver of the mirror—her eyes were slanted Oriental: long lashes, spangled on the upper lids with tiny fragments of god leaf. She glances sideways at the lay figure. It had grown a head, she thought. The face was turned away. "To reach between your shoulderblades," said the German. What does he look for there, she wondered.

"Between my thighs," she whispered, moving on the bed. The silk there was dotted with the same gold, like sequins. He placed his hand under her shoulder, turned her. The skirt twisted on her thighs: she saw their two inner edges blond and set off by the muskrat skin on the slit of the skirt. The Mélanie in the mirror watched sure fingers move to the center of her back, search, find a small key, which he began to wind.

"I got you in time," he breathed. "You would have stopped, had I not..."

The face of the lay figure had been turned toward her, all the time. There was no face.

She woke up, not screaming, but moaning as if sexually aroused.

[Bleak&Icy]

Our friend's thoughts became like the darting wings of a flock of swifts.

"She doesn't know that my soul's as brittle as glass and as cold as an icicle! She doesn't know that under her hot hand and heavy cowslip breath I feel as light and frail and feathery as hoar-frost! She's no more idea what a person like me really feels than she has of the feeling of the Loch Ness monster!"

And while he felt the hot magnetism of her senses rock him on its waves like a baby in a cradle, he thought how unemotional, how coldly vicious, how entirely imaginative his own sensual feelings were. "Why," he thought, "I can't even enjoy playing with Wizzie without reminding myself that I bought her for eighteen pounds! What I'm made for is quiet, cold-blooded lust. This hot passion's horrible to me!"

-- Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys

[Ligeia]

“I’d rather not stay here longer! I’d rather sleep.” “Sleep! How strange you are. Oh, you’ll see how beautiful it is! And what extraordinary… what Unknown… what marvellous desires it instills into Your flesh! We’ll come back by the river, in my sampan. And we’ll spend the night in a flower-boat. Wouldn’t you like to?” She lightly tapped my hands several times with her fan.
“But you’re not listening to me! Why aren’t you listening to me? You’re pale and melancholy. And, really, you’re not listening to me at all.” She snuggled up against me, sinuous and caressing:
“You’re not listening to me, wretch,” she went on. “And you don’t even caress me! Caress me, darling! Feel how cold and firm my breasts are.” And, in a hollow voice, her eyes darting green, voluptuous and cruel flames, she spoke like this.

The Torture Garden - Octave Mirbeau

[G. S. Carnivals]

"Isabel was by now lounging within one of the huge easy chairs that the hotel had seen fit to scatter around the foyer. Her legs were stretched out, skirt hitched to the upper thighs in an unladylike fashion, but he admired, without really being seen to be looking, their shapely but slender length. She was flirting with everybody who happened to be passing, just by means of her sulky pose, he thought. Her hair had been let out since last night's dinner, for then he had enjoyed the severe, but sophisticated, way she had carved a head of hair worthy of a Fine Art museum; the butterflies that decorated it seemed to give off smoky breath, that was indeed the fine waspish wisps that the clips had not succeeded in holding back. Now, her hair, newly shampooed, would smell of herb complexes and was undulating down upon her shoulders with a fullness through which he yearned to run his fingers."

D. F. Lewis - Miscreant in Moonstream