“From the First, the Body Was Dirt”

by Camille T. Dungy

For T.S.

Whose hands touched, first, the head
of the penis, the shaft?

And was it soft
or shale? More rock
than clay.

And who pinched first
into their place the small cups
at the base of the ass?

Who was it
got down there, on whose knees,
and blew — 
and was that passion
or panic, the machine that drove
those exhalations?
 — and how
could we rate the power of that
breath — breeze or gale or a whisper
like the song the little boy sings
to the beetle,
whose small legs moved in tune
like his legs, the legs on that first body, must have
moved, if they did move, when
the dust settled.

In my mind everything’s become enormous.

But was it ever small like that, the first body?

Did it ever sit close to the ants and their piles
of dirt from which that body had come?
You were a small boy once, I suppose.

You were dirty from the start.

You showed me how to use a cock ring,
and why.
How, without ever paying
for a room, to spend two weeks in any city.
How two men could fuck
and continue to face each other
directly
took my body and showed me,
my back on a table, my knees by my head.
Stretched me
into seeing you were more than a dog.

You must be dead by now, though I don’t know
whose hands prepared you.

Whose fingers
fingered, for the final time,
all that dark and kinky hair?

If the first body was made of dirt,
in order to plumb the hollow
of that first throat, whose thumb
first lodged inside the hinge
of that first mouth to force it open?

To make the tongue, so it could work,
who shoved inside that mouth
the shit of a hundred thousand worms?

— Poetry, December 2011

Camille T. Dungy’s full-length poetry publications include Suck on the Marrow (2010) and the sonnet collection What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006), which was a finalist for both the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Here is a Q&A; on “From the First, the Body Was Dirt.”