Galway KinnellWalnut
On the pot-holed road from the Port Authority Terminal the Newark Airport bus sighs up and down as if moguling. In my experience, motion of this kind while sitting in a bus often increases the size of the penis. It does so now. A mixed sign. In certain operas the desire for sex and the allure of death seem to be present just before or just after each other but occasionally simultaneously. Consider the love life of the prostate. During love-making this gland, which is, as doctors like to say, the size of a walnut, and has very few pleasure fibers in it but a great many for pain, transmits the sensation of pain with growing intensity, until at last, when our walnut can no longer bear it, the duct opens and semen bursts out and gives shuddering relief or ecstatic joy, as you like. Climbing the Pulaski Skyway on a faulty pneumatic suspension, the bus gasps and blows and develops a bucking rhythm that lets me imagine what the fuck- ing of buses could be like. Minutes later I find myself thinking the bus moves like an antediluvian mammal being shoved to its grave without first having been fully persuaded its time is up. Though not kept informed explicitly, the penis instinctively senses this turn of thought, and shrinks.
Galway Kinnell is the author of nine books of poetry, including The Book of Nightmares, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, and Imperfect Thirst. He has published books of translations, including the poems of François Villon and Rainer Maria Rilke. His latest collection is A New Selected Poems, and a book of new poems, Strong Is Your Hold, will be published in October. Galway Kinnell has been a MacArthur Fellow and State Poet of Vermont. Books of his have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He taught for many years at New York University, where he was Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing. He lives in Vermont and New York City.
