Scrubbing her ivory hands of the earth ingrained into the crevices of her lanky fingers Rosemary Sepulveda has just completed her soil sculpture of Aloys II, Prince of Liechtenstein. Sepulveda, in her modish upper west side loft, speaks interminably of Liechtenstein’s favorite prince – a subject she studied exhaustively in a European History course at the Hokkaido Musashi Women’s Junior College in the 1970′s.  Her brief stint in Japan coincided with her father’s research trip in which he began studying the Coryceps sinensis, known colloquially as caterpillar fungus. Here, Dr. Victor Sepulveda penned the now famous, Endoparasitoids: The Emerging Underground Futures Trading Market. It was also on this trip that she and her father perfected their botamochi recipe that I enjoy while listening to her narration of Prince Aloys II’s trials as a maladroit apiarist. Her expert recitation of seemingly inconsequential historical events recalls her 1979 poem, poena, based on the memoirs of John McDonald, the early 20th century mayor of Dunedin, New Zealand. It is these overseas jaunts as a child that would inform her universally celebrated poetry.

Sepulveda is a tall woman; she wears a skirt whose size and pattern resembles a Baltimore album quilt. Her hair cascades gracefully against her carefully sculpted cheekbones as she thumbs through the diary she kept while living in the Radu Vodă Monastery in Bucharest, which inspired the 1983 classic, le lapin baise la loutre. Some of Sepulveda’s most famous love poems stem from this period where trysts with men of the church were an not uncommon addition to her schedule. “Our clandestine meetings were excruciatingly amorous” she explains as she fondly presses her spindly digits to her chest. “A feeling you are unable to capture with age and enlightenment.”

your loving is wet
not unlike
a tub of water set
upon your head that falls
and then, ooh, your balls.

Sepulveda’s erudition grew from her time at Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and that summer with her father in Sapporo). At Oxford she mastered the arts; sculpture and theater her métier. At MIT she dabbled in the physical sciences. “I had an unparalleled alacrity for engineering, so the design came to me somewhat mechanically.” The design, of course, is that of the iconic dome of the planetarium at the Hong Kong Space Museum. Only weeks after her 21st birthday, Sepulveda had come up with the design while sketching on her friend’s umiak on the Sabugi River in northern Brazil. Her professor and beau had been a consultant for the project in Hong Kong and a simple long-distance phone call and facsimile transmission began what she thought would be a long, lucrative career as a structural engineer.

Sepulveda’s cerulean eyes examine that same sketch with a striking intensity as I trade glances between her and the bowl of arracacha she’d been preparing for our noontide nosh. Her arms are tense and folded below her slight breasts as she repositions her feet, she moves closer and then further away, experiencing the drawing from all angles. She lets out a sigh as she hands me the original sheet of yellowing and crinkled paper. She asks me to turn it over. Her anxiousness is manifest in two sides of paper that are each vying for existence; the planetarium sketch on the one side, the first stanza of what would become her most famous work on the other.

his hairy thighs taunt
im not your aunt
i taste your dick
it cures what’s sick

Despite countless accolades for her beguiling prose, the 20th century’s preeminent poet lives with her doubts about choosing this path. Rosemary and I tour her Dettingen estate, just south of Rottenburg am Neckar in southern Germany. The sun washes against her ageless face as she squats next to a patch of Queen Anne’s Lace like an alert Elfin rabbit admiring her avant-garde creation. “The inspiration for this architectural design is actually a combination of two distinct styles; one stemming from the Mamluk Sultanate period in 13th century Egypt; the second, from an adaptation of the shape of the grebe, a  graceful freshwater diving bird I wrote about while summering in Burkina Faso in 1995.” Her affection for design is omnipresent as we step inside for a cup of handcrafted Gewürztraminer.

Vexed as her mind may be, the consumers of her poetry, our emotions, have cast their votes with each tear shed, each burden lifted as we ingest these tragic yet ultimately chimerical prose.

phallic as a goose neck
extended to the heavens
my vagina now a train wreck
your cock in inches, seven

Photo via Wikimedia Commons