Odd footnote on Larry Levis

 This shows up on p. 70 of Elegy:

Lovely convulsion of thighs lathered as a horse's back,

Because, as Marx said,
Sex should be no more important than a glass of water.

When I read this, I recalled the same idea had shown up in The Darkening Trapeze, p. 67, when Levis is explaining that "the only surviving son of Jesus Christ was Karl Marx":

One thing he said I still remember, a thing that's never there 

When I try to look it up, was "Sex should be no more important...

Than a glass of water." It sounded vaguely like the kind of thing

Christ might have said if Christ had a sense of humor.

Levis's difficulty in looking up the quotation likely results from the quotation usually being attributed not to Marx, but to Alexandra Kollontai, a key figure in the Bolshevik intelligentsia.