Night Life of the Pennsylvania Dutch

In the night life of the Pennsylvania Dutch,
bundling was once, is sometimes still, the way
to trundle one’s ungovernably blazing fires
into touch and sway with someone you desired:
human duo on a mattress pillowed to allow
a mumbling stumble of the intimate to lodge
between, against soft layers of a flannel barrier

enforcing chastity: talk and touch, permitted –
naked skin: too much – taboo; wanting would be
muffled – stuffed – into the burning caverns
of the two of you. We are not unlike a bundled
couple, kept from coitus: for us, a barnyard
whiff of essence wafts indifferently into our cage:
promised delectations of the thing outside

so irresistible that finally we rage at being thwarted,
and the walls are clawed, pulled down: our fine
deliverance from full abandonment aborted:
passion’s pyroclastic flow sears ass to ash.
Why not take a breather in the bed, detect
the larger loveliness instead? Perhaps the good
life doesn’t mean you get a thing, but rather

bids you bring a bundling to every swing
of contradicting sense: thus stand to find
the recompense of wrestling paradoxes into all
their wacko parts – find their unrelated hearts.
Then, lightly musing on this elemental feud, praise
right use of plenitude. Maybe bundling answers
in its harbor-fleece. Might lend a kind of peace.


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