Maybe drunken stump arson really is better than casual sex with a nondescript partner. I can't say that I've ever tried either.
Far be it from me to yuck someone else's yum (she said, primly).
Actually, unlike
David discussing his relationship with Jonathan, which is the passage I immediately thought of when I read that part of the poem, the poet here
does not say that what he felt while sharing this experience with his male friend was
better than a heterosexual episode.
Quote:
Now, tell me, other than lying between some woman's legs,
what joy have you had since, that equaled this?
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As I see it, the narrator is either saying that lying between some woman's legs is
on the same plane of joy as this experience, or that a heterosexual experience is too
exceptional for fair comparisons to be made to it--thus removing it from the conversation (even as he is introducing it to the conversation). Either of those messages is pretty different from how a lot of people in this thread seem to be interpreting the gist.
I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned that The New York Times published
an essay last week about how difficult it is for heterosexual men to talk about the non-erotic love they feel for other men in their lives--in part because they're so terrified of being mistaken for homosexual, and being attacked, either literally or figuratively, by other men terrified of homosexuality.
I was keenly interested in the subject of things men aren't allowed to say without negative social consequences, because there are so many things that women are not allowed to say without negative social consequences. But I thought the New York Times essay wasn't quite a bullseye. I would like to see some of the poets here try to do justice to that topic.
Part of the communication problem is that English, usually so rich in synonyms with various shades of connotation, has surprisingly few words for the various flavors of love. It's harder to talk about something clearly when the vocabulary for it is so limited, when compared to the subject's complexity. For example, a lot of the nuance of the triple "Do you love me?" "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you" exchange between Jesus and Peter (
John 21:15,
John 21:16, and
John 21:17) is lost in translation, because each of them is using a different verb for "love" until the third time, when Jesus finally switches to the verb that Peter is using. (This conversation takes place after Jesus's death, and thus after Peter's triple denial--an opportunity for a triple do-over. But it seems to me that something pretty important is happening in that shift from one verb to another. I can't quite figure out what it is, though.)