Featured Artist: William Pitt Root

William Pitt Root was one of the featured poets at the First Annual Asheville Poetry Review Reading Series (along with Marilyn Kallet and Pamela Uschuk), and he shared the marvelous poem below, which I have reprinted from his book White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West with his permission. He told the audience that he saw a video of slugs mating on a television nature program and was mesmerized. This poem is the result. I have also included a video of slugs mating below the poem. It is truly incredible, and Bill's poem is a moving and fitting tribute to this wonder of nature.

Slugs Amorous in the Air
by William Pitt Root

"The spirit moves,
Yet stays:
...
A small thing,
Singing."

                -Theodore Roethke


On mucous films they glide,
gracefully monstrous:


slick misbegotten whales,
halved, cast out onto land,


shrunken, left to cross forever
the shoreless sea of earth.


Indifferent to us,
these constant voyagers


detecting in each other clues
of readiness--who knows how?


They soar like gradual
eagles up a bank of tree


out onto a dark current
of limb, then dangle


from a single length
of shared umbilicus


high in clear blue
air, spinning


slowly in the globe
of their own motion,


two beings intent
upon each other


as only lovers are,
each laved by the liquid other


in bodylength embrace.
Like darkly pairing tongues


or the sundered halves
of Leviathan


trying bright reunion
in the sea of air,


they hang in that whole kiss
while we look on


radiant with disgust and envious,
pitching toward awe


as from each head
organs emerge unfurling


like silk parachutes
exquisite with awareness,


each coddling its exact
other in the counterfeit


with a long careful touching,
numinous as saint,


unutterably lewd
as they merge


in a bright soft lock
joined as orchids


might join if animated
by desire, trembling


blossom against blossom,
slow pulse


matching slow pulse
as these doubly sexed


beings will do,
continuing an hour


and more,
each gross shape further


extending (from the chill
of what should be


its head) the lucent
figure of an organ


wholly sexual as angels,
male and female brilliance twinned.


And what passes
between them


in this urgent healing
sought by the never whole


passes slow as nectar
shining in the deepest


flower we know
and multiplies


into these glistening miracles
we who grow gardens


in our annoyance
never guess.



*Reprinted from White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) by permission of the author.