Climax Of Lovemaking Poem by gershon hepner

According to John Wilmot the enjoyment
that is the climax of lovemaking cuts off life
and fire after sexual deployment.
This tends to disappoint a mistress or a wife
who’s focused on mirages like romance
with somebody she thinks that she can only keep
by being loved, while fearing there’s a chance
her lover will fall out of love when he’s asleep.

Both mistresses and wives make a mistake
if they do not in their enjoyment put their trust,
insisting that their lovers stake awake
after their lovemaking has resolved their lust.
There are of course a lot of ways to marshal
the sexual talents that in love are de rigeur,
but pithiness, to which I am as partial
as epigrams of Martial, is what men prefer.

Inspired by G. W. Bowersock’s review of Garry Wills’s translation of “Martial’s Epigrams” (“Court Poet & Pornographer, ” NYT, February 26,2009) . Bowersock writes:
My own copy of the old Oxford Classical Text edition of Martial belonged to the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, whose brother Zeph, my colleague at Harvard, gave it to me. Since Justice Stewart is perhaps best known for remarking of hard-core pornography 'I know it when I see it, ' I have often wondered what he thought of the poems of Martial that were once in his hands. Did he know pornography when he read it, or did the brilliant verse and wild imaginings of the poet make up for the unquestionably sordid episodes in the epigrams? Perhaps the greatest writer of explicitly sexual poetry since Martial's own day was John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, in the seventeenth century. Alexander Pope admired him, but Samuel Johnson execrated him.


2/9/09