Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A WOMAN FOR THE ADVENTURE, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A WOMAN FOR THE ADVENTURE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I want a woman for the adventure
Last Line: Such the woman I want for the adventure!
Subject(s): Marriage; Weddings; Husbands; Wives


I WANT a woman for the adventure:
And my demands are monstrous, never to be met...

For I want first the body that slopes like a wave of the sea toward my senses:
And whose desire is for me, my least kiss fetching the answering glow:
And whose face, pensive in the twilight, sends my mind back to the legend of women,
And whose coming and going is as the footfall of the wind on a summer's night,
And whose words drop between pauses of music gentle and piercing,
And who gives herself in the wish of children.

But that is not all: oh, not more than a fragment of what I demand:
I want her to be the mother of my hours of weakness:
Quick will be the intuition searching to my need and my cry:
Gentle the healing of those caressing hands, breath of that soothing voice:
Deep will be the love that makes me whole again.

And yet more I ask: insatiate man that I am:
I want the comrade free and supple-hearted as a man,
Who puts on her boots and her khaki and goes out with me on the holiday morning,
And away we tramp on a lark, young vagrants both:
And she will swim, and sleep on the ground, and climb up the mountains,
Yea, she will up, at a moment's notice, and be off to strange cities,
And take the peril and the joy of strange lands and strange people.
And she will be willing to live without me when she sends me off on some journey.

Yet demand worst of all: and paradox quaint:
As I stand father to the children of her body,
I want the woman who stands father to the children of my spirit:
Yea, she who comes to her fulfillment through my vision and my works:
She who impregnates my soul with seed of her spirit,
Until there grows the life that through mighty travail is born:
Our works: our child!

Ah, you will say: not a woman, but a goddess I demand:
Ah, you will tell me I am monstrous, and so will not find her:
Yet, out with the truth of it! Such are the cravings of men:
Such the woman I want for the adventure!





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