Jennifer

I step naked into the back yard
Under a full moon
And piss on the rich soil
At the edge of the flower bed,

Feeling both Whitmanesque and dog-like,
Mystical and silly.

When I was a kid my friends and I
Would pee together, crossing
Our yellow swords,
Seeing who could go longest and farthest.

And over the years
Three or four women have asked shyly
If they could watch
What might have seemed to them
The essential male act; brutish
And comic, complexly hydraulic,
Full of archaic territoriality,

The one act of the penis
Over which we have more control
Than they do.

Maybe that’s why,
When I walked home a little buzzed
From a Denver bar one winter night
With a girl I hardly knew
And desperately needing a convenient tree

She took me in her cold hand
And wrote her own name in the snow.