Source Of The Nile Poem by gershon hepner

Sir Richard Burton, searching for the sources
both of the Nile and women’s privities,
found tribal slavegirls with amazing forces
that stimulated sex proclivities.
With muscles called constrictor vaginae,
their cunts could cause an orgasm by squeezing
his explorer. I imagine he
found searching for their sources far more pleasing
that searching for the sources of the Nile,
translated by the slavegirls as he would
translate the Kama Sutra, erectile
though unconstructed by tight womanhood.

Richard Bernstein reviews “The East, the West, and Sex, ” by Toni Bentley, in the NYT Book Review, June 21,2009:
Burton, one of the most brilliant and romantic figures of the 19th century, conducted parallel searches for the source of the Nile and the source of Flaubert’s pleasure, not unconnected drives. While he did not quite succeed with the Nile, he did find that certain tribal slave girls made expert use of “the constrictor vaginae muscles, ” so that a woman could induce her partner’s orgasm “not by wriggling and moving but by tightening and loosing the male member with the muscles of her privities.” (Now there’s a decent indecent word for us, girls!) She was known as a kabbazah, which in Arabic means “holder.” Holders were quite expensive. Meanwhile, of the single brutal swipe that rendered a boy a eunuch, Burton reported laconically, “He often survives.”


6/28/09