Washing Up The bed is wrecked and wet. What skin can say is said. You rouse and rise to sponge my seed from your legs. I roll aside for your return in sailor's knots of sheets. At this late hour, having run aground our polar powers, it should be possible to say anything. Still distance yawns; the breaking waves that joined us divide us. How you fear these waters where hunger's cargo is broken loose, shattered on the shoals of sex to salvage, I know-- know too well the surging rip, and flesh too fragile in its grip. No need now to wonder whatever will become of us. It has come and it is this. That in us which can dissolve has dissolved. Just the gnarled heartwood left tangled on the tideline. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved. Washing Up is an attempt at a realistic poem of erotic understanding. Some readers consider the poem discouraging or assume that the relationship or the sexual experience depicted is somehow lacking. Poets in particular are expected to convey the transcendant nature of the erotic experience. While sex is a powerful, even overpowering experience, it is insufficient in itself to cause and carry the weight of a love relationship. Sex is a language the body speaks. It points to love, the way words point to thought. Sex will become communion only when speech becomes telepathy.    The graphic is based on two of a set of handsome interparagraph ornaments that North Country artist, arctic explorer and badboy pinko Rockwell Kent rendered for his wonderfully illustrated and elegantly designed edition of Voltaire's Candide.