Molly Peacock (born June 30, 1947) is an American-Canadian poet, essayist and creative nonfiction writer.
She was an honorary fellow at The Johns Hopkins University, served as Poet-in-Residence at The American Poets’ Corner, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City, and received awards from the Danforth Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Peacock has performed her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, Off Broadway and throughout North America.
AUBADE
Molly Peacock
The morning is lifted aloft by the praise
and prayers of birds without the noise
of even occasional traffic yet. “Mays”
lift the cloud of “may nots” that were night’s voices–
mock, stock, quarrel, sorrow, and snarl. Fine
cries in the skies about Tomorrow! So it is.
Darkness was not a cover. It was shame’s time
beat to a rhyme of not/got. “Have” and “save” twist
in the clouds which bear aloft the morning
messages of words talked out loud in dreams
un– or dis– or half-remembered by darning
voices sewing holes that night poked in the seams
through which those words escaped and rose on wings so
to bear the day to what it seems, and sings so.
======
DECIDING TO END YOUR LIFE, YOU THANK ME
Molly Peacock
MAID: Medical Assistance in Dying, Toronto
When you looked up and said, “Thank you,” I saw
your gratitude rise over us like rain.
It seemed external to us both–an awe
of what we were about to do (a sane
alternative to modern agony).
The dryness between us had been like climate,
like desiccation, like chapped lips only
chapped everything. You’d stopped being a mate,
stopped thanking. I’d begun drying up rough
as a towel in wind.
So, your thank you was rain.
It swept through like a front–and within…
I stood getting soaked to a rapid bloom,
knowing you knew the wasteland we’d been in,
and, from this, we’d make your desert garden.
==========
MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU CRYING?
Molly Peacock
When someone cries, after making love spills
a pail of tears inside, it is the ache
of years, all the early years’ emptiness
hollowed into a pail-like form which fills
with feeling now felt aloud, that resounds.
Why would an orgasm make someone weep?
Why, for being loved now when one had not been.
The anger tendered into tears astounds
the lover with fear to have struck so deep.
=====
THE RETURN
Molly Peacock
When I open my legs to let you seek,
seek inside me, seeking more, I think
“What are you looking for?” and feel it will
be hid from me, whatever it is, still
or rapidly moving beyond my frequency.
Then I declare you a mystery
and stop myself from moving and hold still
until you can find your orgasm. Peak
is partly what you look for, and the brink
you love to come to and return to must
be part of it, too, thrust, build, the trust
that brings me, surprised, to a brink of my own…
I must be blind to something of my own
you recognize and look for. A diamond
speaks in a way through its beams, though it’s dumb
to the brilliance it reflects. A gem at the back
of the cave must tell you, “Yes, you can go back.”
======
SHE LAYS
Molly Peacock
She lays each beautifully mooned index finger
in the furrow on the right and on the left
sides of her clitoris and lets them linger
in their swollen cribs until the wish to see the shaft
exposed lets her move her fingers at the same time
to the right and left sides pinning back
the labia in a next of hair, the pink sack
of folds exposed, the purplish ridge she’ll climb,
when she lets one hand re-pin the labia
to free the other to wander with a withheld
purpose as if it were lost in the sands when the Via
To The City appeared suddenly, exposed:
when the whole exhausted mons is finally held
by both hands is when the Via gates are closed,
but they are open now, as open as her
thighs lying open among the arranged pillows.
Secrets have no place in the orchid boat of her
body and old pink brain beneath the willows.
This is self-love, assured, and this is lost time.
This is knowing, knowing, known
since growing, growing, grown:
revelation without astonishment,
understanding what is meant.
This is world-love.
======
THE SURGE
Molly Peacock
Maybe it is the shyness of the pride
he has when he puts my hand down to feel
the hardness of his cock I hadn’t tried
by any conscious gesture to raise,
yet it rose for my soft presence in the bed:
there was nothing I did to earn its praise
but be alive next to it. Maybe it is
the softness of want beneath his delight
at his body going on with his . . .
his will, really, his instructions . . . that
surges inside me as a sort of surrender
to the fact that I am, that I was made, that
there is nothing I need do to please but be.
To do nothing but be, and this be wanted:
so, this is love. Look what happened, he says as he
watches my hand draw out what it did not raise,
purpled in sleep. The surge inside me must
come from inside me, where the world lies,
just as the prick stiffened to amaze us
came from a rising inside him. The blessing
we feel is knowing that out there is nothing.