A Woman’s Terrain

I am one of the few women I know who has been able to make the journey back to a woman’s native terrain, 

back to the fecundity and wilds of the erotic and managed to re-assimilate.  

I who like every other woman grew up believing that this desert life with its renunciation and self-flagellation, 

the endless dogma 

or right and wrong 

and the appropriation of the erotic into the edicts of a masculine world based on production at all costs, 

managed to travel 

on the underworld railroad back to my origin, 

where fullness and bounty, 

appetite and a different order of power operates.  

I returned in the most literal sense to my senses.  

Awakened a sensing organ that proved useless in a man-made world, 

a sensing organ that can feel into the feeling states of others and quell the never-ending hunger that had plagued me, 

the hunger of the human animal for intimacy.