Goines On: “Proceed with coition”

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While working on a poem using sexual metaphors for depicting a writer’s encounter with his muse, Goines remembered his virginal college sophomore shock during a Saturday night party in Yale’s Calhoun College upon seeing the placard tacked on one of the host suite’s two bedroom doors: “Proceed with coition.”
    Though Goines had not quite yet had sexual intercourse, he was not unschooled in some of its vocabulary, so he got the pun. (Had anyone thought the third word a misspelling?)
    Upon imagining the placard anew, he wondered how many had acted on its suggestion.
    Later, he wondered whether anybody had acted on it.
    It seemed to Goines now that the placard may have served to enforce the word the placard punned on: CAUTION. Others are looking! If you enter that bedroom, ears may be glued to the door! When you come out, there might be snickers, winks, jokes, questions!
    Some undergraduates (or “townies”) at the party, of course, had been having sex for years, so they might have marched into the bedroom in flagrante delicto.
    Goines emailed the three surviving classmates who occupied that suite of rooms (the fourth had died recently) and asked whether any of them remembered the placard, and might even have proceeded with coition that evening.

    Though they had now had two weeks to reply, none of them had done so…. Was Goines alone in remembering and wondering at things past?
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Note: The cover image is Luis Morris’ “Artist’s Muse,” (2009).

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