Leg over Leg: Volumes Three and Four

To honor which the very caliph’s throne its head should dip.

Take my crown, but give me in return the lightest kiss

From the edges of your mouth, or tiniest sip!

or should she enter the presence of the august confidant of the emir, his honored vizier, he’d be too taken aback with admiration and esteem to go on with his mission, would toss her his ring in submission, and recite

To you I cede judgment in all things

Over the highest-ranking emir or vizier

For what is dustūr²⁵³ if not dussa tawrun²⁵⁴ to you?

How then can you refuse this career?

3.19.7

and, should she enter one of the chief judge’s sessions, he’d bestow on her treasure, pearls, and all his possessions, and recite

She has an advantage over me in love—

Two parts to which the male can lay no claim.²⁵⁵

Thus I am owed two things, which I demand

Of her — and both this and that my lust enflame,

and, should she drop in on a physician treating a man for impotence, he’d prescribe him a rub with the cartilage of her nose-end or a sniff of her neck-bend, and recite

As fat of skink and theriac for all ills

Is your mouth’s saliva, and for the limp lover too,

So that when he’s squeezed of every drop of spittle,

You may feed him sips of wine — and what a wine! — in lieu,

3.19.8

and should she pay a visit to an astrologer, he’d throw down his astrolabe in surprise and stupefaction, babbling and distraction, and recite

We can see naught but your beauty, bright as forenoon,

For that it is which fills with light the pitch dark night.

Your sphere-like breasts confuse the gazer when at the stars he stares,

So you now must take his charts and set them right,

or to a philosopher, he and his wisdom alike would go for naught, he’d find he’d no good sense left to stop him feeling fraught, and he’d recite

When two bodies rub together, sparks fly—

So say followers of the philosophers’ creed

But this is false for if mine rubbed yours,

Water would flow and I would bleed,

3.19.9

or an engineer, his shapes she’d muddle and his mind befuddle, and he’d recite

Would that your breast-work might be ransomed

By every cube, convexity, and concavity in sight!

Would that that crescent shape you have inside you

Might be firmly seated on my own upright!

or a logician, he’d violate analogy, flail in ambiguity, and recite

Would that her legs might straddle my neck—

How fine that would be as both subject and predicate!

I have become her conclusion, though I’d rather be her premise,

Since every pleasure therein is promised!

3.19.10

or a grammarian, he’d lose all sense of active and passive, decide that knowledge of such things was simply invasive, and recite

Gently, lady! I come not to you in a state of sin²⁵⁶

Nor have I committed offenses worth the name.

I washed my hands of the grammarians, I swear,

When “precedence of the masculine” they made their claim²⁵⁷

or a prosodist, she’d break his heart into feet, so that with “crawling”²⁵⁸ and “propping”²⁵⁹ he’d find himself replete, and recite

You’ve won me, O you of ev’ry charm possessed,

And left my heart with passion dizzee.

By night I watch the stars that in you rise and set and — let me say it—

I want pussy, I want pussy, I want pussee!²⁶⁰

3.19.11

or a poet, he’d hang out his tongue as he drooled with delight, then lick his lips and smack them, bite upon his index finger to check his excitement, and recite

Many an ardent lover’s grown haughty from overweening pride and self-esteem,

But your “shame” inspires me to worship and to passion insane.²⁶¹

If my paronomasia brings me closer to you and makes me more your like,

I’ll praise my punning and rhyme only in that vein.

3.19.12

Indeed, were she to stroke your neck and mine, dear reader, such stroking would both render them unneedful of anti-goiter medicine and strike from them all growths,²⁶² lumps, bumps, protuberances and swellings, pimples, pustules, papules and glands, knots, nodes, nodules, nodulosities, and nodulations, abscesses, ulcers, blisters, blebs, bullas, blains, boils, and sores, furuncles, carbuncles, tetters, tubercles, and buboes, moles, nevuses, and strawberry marks, puckerings, calluses, and callosities, pockmarks and pits, black-heads and whiteheads, yellowing of the teeth, bruises and contusions, goiters and wattles, stiffness and pain, bullneckedness and ewe-neckedness, bending, twisting, kinkiness, cricks, and crookedness, swellings and pain of the throat, quinsy, diphtheria, laryngitis, tracheitis, scars, cicatrices, and scarifications, weeping wounds, open wounds, festering wounds, suppurations, bite marks, hickeys, welts, scratches, scabs, sloughs, cariosities, and necrosities.

3.19.13

And this man-mannered, ill-natured,²⁶³ shrewish, base, disobedient, worthless, shamelessly staring, irascible, wayward, two-timing, unblushing, exhibitionistic, immodest, sharp-tongued, unneighborly, loudmouthed, wanton, whorish, chambering, nocturnally mobile, promiscuous, trampy, brassy, brazen-faced, interfering, spoiled, ugly, languorous, loose, depraved, insatiable, predatory, lustful, estrous, philandering, incontinent, begging, in-heat, backside-presenting, rug-spotting, swollen-vulvaed, termagant, vixenish, foulmouthed, lewd, obscene, bawdy, clamorous, nymphomaniacal, slave-chasing, lecherous, licentious, lascivious slut of a mistress of mine, whom every male in town who sees her strutting through its markets, streets, alleys, lanes, and cul-de-sacs believes to be inviting him, with her eyes and her every limb, to look lively and apply himself to intercourse,²⁶⁴ to cock a leg, to snatch a kiss, to become erect, to copulate, to bed, to swive, to screw, to thrum, to wimble, to ejaculate (inside and outside), to have coitus (interruptus and non-), to meng, to frig, to frot, to hug, to mount, to hump, to pump, to jigger, to jagger, to jangle, on all fours, with her on her back or her front, with her legs splayed or closed, from the side or at an angle, during menstruation or not and with or without deep penetration, as well as to “wham-bam!” and “schlup-flup!” and “jiggy-jiggy!” and “hokey-pokey!” sits in the chambers of the dame of gossips and never stops accusing her neighbors of looking out the window, laughing, dressing, perfuming themselves, putting on their jewelry, and then going out and walking around affectedly.

3.19.14

But have you forgotten, my mistress, the day you told your teacher,²⁶⁵ “Everyone who falls in love blanches at the mention of the beloved” and he answered you, “It isn’t always so” and you got on your high horse and insisted on your claim and he did the same and insisted on denying it, and you told him, to convince him, “If you were to mention to me the name of…” and then blanched and fell silent and he asked you, the horn hatching from his head with a rending sound, “The name of whom?” and you laughed and said, “I don’t know!”? Or the windy day²⁶⁶ when he took you out to raise your spirits and you set off (he, in his naïveté, being none the wiser) having exposed half your chest and buffed to a shine your décolletage, the skin of your chest, and the aureoles around your nipples, and when he turned to look at you and found you in this state, you said it was the wind that had done it? Or the day when he was walking with you and you said, marveling at love’s dominion, “I’d give my life for the one I love!” and when he asked you, you said, “You, of course! You’re the one.” Or the day when you sent your servingman, or on which you dispatched your serving girl,²⁶⁷ or the morning you wrote a slip of paper inviting the one who desired you, or the forenoon you were so late, or the evening you put on perfume, or the time you made excuses, or the occasion you claimed you were having your period, or the night you raved and talked in your sleep, or the moment you raved and muttered and mumbled or put on your finery and dolled yourself up or tied a piece of string around your finger²⁶⁸ or made a sour face and submitted or said it was wrong — right up until you’d taken it all the way to the hilt? Weren’t all these sins as bad as your neighbor’s looking out of her window?