Eric Higgins 

Nude But Not Undressed

​You have hands. They’re natural. They gather, feed. But your friends have
hands, too, and sometimes they’re led to your wife’s pantyhose, which they find and
for hours they stroke. Imagine her legs—flexed, jumpy. Responsive to pressure.
Inviting it, inviting pressure, I almost said. But we can’t know the domain of legs just
as we can’t know the domain of dreamworlds, and so we must forgive flesh that
never touches flesh, though my friends have wives and I, I have gloves

---

Dear Samuel Johnson

So you’re dead.
As of 1784, in fact.
I googled you—that’s a thing we do
on our laptops. Our laptops are like
half-open dictionaries stuck in zero gravity
which is why we type “laptop” instead:
to be unencumbered is still
what we grope for, as it was for you.
You chose structure;
we choose less of it.
It may be that simple
but truly you’re unhip

with relativists, could be
codifying implies the book shutting
according to a blogger
with whom I agree.
I’m not saying you’re bad
(unwritten rules dictate
that word not appear in print),
maybe elitist, arrogant, and a touch
repressive, and not you but the book--
          like language, terrifying
on its raring hooves.




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Eric Higgins has poems appearing in or forthcoming from Barrow Street, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. A recent Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center fellowship, he holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where he was awarded the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry