Kissing

The Kiss

Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.

—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

"The Kiss," from Everything Else in the World by Stephen Dunn. 

A Yellow Summer Dress

Why does this light force me back

   by Jane Kenyon

to my childhood? I wore a yellow
summer dress, and the skirt
made a perfect circle.
                         Turning and turning
until it flared to the limit
was irresistible . . . . The grass and trees,
my outstretched arms, and the skirt
whirled in the ochre light
of an early June evening.
                         And I knew then
that I would have to live,
and go on living: what sorrow it was;
and still what sorrow ignites
but does not consume
my heart.

Admittedly

Except for the Body

by Mary Oliver

Except for the body

of someone you love,

including all its expressions

in privacy and in public,

trees, I think,

are the most beautiful

forms on the earth.

Though, admittedly,

if this were a contest,

the trees would come in

an extremely distant second.

Slippery

Road Trip

by Andrea Cohen

Of course we stole

the motel soap. Weren’t

we supposed to? So
we could go home

and try to hold
those slippery

slivers, which,
like everything

we pretended
was ours, touched

us, and vanished?

Top Ten

turkish delight

jasmine pearl tea

eyewear

outdoor fruit and vegetable markets

baking bread

being in my body

pockets

giving books I love to people I think might love them too

The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

diners

grandma Kelley's rice casserole

Le Mans Hall

midwives

Spencer Tunick

clowns

"Nails, Hair, Hip, Heels" by Todrick Hall

democracy

church bells

Gellért Fürdő

African chicken and peanut soup from the New England Soup Factory

martini with blue cheese stuffed olives

1059 Riverside

gesztenyepüré

Greek yogurt with honey, in Greece

watching episodes of Grey's Anatomy from the early seasons with my kids

Book Club

Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins

Rome

Indigo Girls

dandelions

sleep

Warren Dunes State Park

french fries

Ted Kooser

clean pressed sheets

walking by a lilac bush in bloom

holding hands

playgrounds

NPR

hard wood floors

handmade afghans

coffee

Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer, by Jean- Hippolyte Flandrin

marching bands

HONK! festival of activist street bands

my clever, funny friend

roasted chestnuts

Miss Mary, my terrible dog

birdie sing in the tree, woo woo woo, wee wee wee, I love you and you love me

Henszlmann Imre utca, 5

cuckoo clocks

handwritten letters

potluck dinners

Thai massage

Amanda Palmer

marathons, watching them

hiking, with the right shoes

public schools

#metoo

neighbors

pie crust

yellow roses

Walden Pond

giving away my homemade jams

running at my own pace

the truth

Lift my Shirt

 How to Triumph Like a Girl 

BY ADA LIMÓN

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

Think of that.

 Sorrow Is Not My Name

BY ROSS GAY

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No

matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.

There is a time for everything. Look,

just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak.

Then the wind kicked up, and,

after arranging that good suit of feathers

he up and took off.

Just like that. And to boot,

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things,

some with names so generous as to kick

the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,

stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks

at the market. Think of that. The long night,

the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me

on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.

But look; my niece is running through a field

calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel

and at the end of my block is a basketball court.

I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

      —for Walter Aikens

Ross Gay, "Sorrow Is Not My Name" from Bringing the Shovel Down.  

I'll Make the Fudge

 

My House

Nikki Giovanni

---

i only want to
be there to kiss you
as you want to be kissed
when you need to be kissed
where i want to kiss you 
cause its my house and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you
when i want to hug you
as you like to hug me
does this sound like a silly poem

i mean its my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in
carpet stores gathering 
patches so i could make
a quilt
does this really sound
like a silly poem

i mean i want to keep you
warm

and my windows might be dirty
but its my house
and if i can't see out sometimes
they can't see in either

english isn't a good language
to express emotion through
mostly i imagine because people
try to speak english instead
of trying to speak through it
i don't know maybe it is
a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house
and i'll make fudge and call
it love and touch my lips
to the chocolate warmth
and smile at old men and call
it revolution cause what's real
is really real
and i still like men in tight
pants cause everybody has some
thing to give and more
important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me 
happy
so this is your poem

loop de loops

 ODE

By Paisley Rekdal

And now the silver, ripping sound of white on white, the satin,

light snow torn

under wheels, car bang metally grenading, and the wood poles,

whipping, loom—

 

                                     ¤

 

I have always wanted to sing a song of praise

 

for the unscathed: myself

stepping from the fractured car whose black axle’s one inch

from gone; slim pole slicing cable

 

up to sheet metal, seat foam, corduroy

(like butter, the mechanic will later

tell me, poking a stiff finger through the cloth),

to pierce the exact point

 

I was supposed to sit, stopping

because praise begins where pain

transfigures itself,

stoppered by a deeper kind of joy: so I

transfigure myself from driver

 

to survivor, the blessed Lazarine failure

 

bolting up and opening her eyes.

And here are the thousand wrecks

from a life configured in snow before me: myself,

at five, pulled from the burning car seat;

at twelve, bleeding from the scalp

after the car throws me from my bike; at fourteen,

tumbling over the slick hood rushing;

sockets of windows with glass

bashed out into a translucent, toothy ring; lights

and bumpers clipped clean off; tires burst; deer

gravitationally hurled through my windshield; brakes

given out and worse,

 

the icy loop de loops

on roads, the trucker’s 18 fat wheels squealing—

All the ways technology should have killed me

 

and didn’t.

Praise for my death-hungry luck!

And all the manner in which I’ve failed it—

marriage lost,

 

buried in the blanks of white space, my solitude

at the Greyhound station

knowing no one to retrieve me,

carless among the other pressed tight

to their own disaster or boredom—

unbearably young mothers,

 

drifters, boy soldiers

shoulder to shoulder with the insane, weaving

the same thread of conversation back and forth

between ourselves. How

 

could this happen to me

at this age, at this stage, how

did I not notice, and will you put this seat up?

and will you lend me this quarter? and will you

call me a cab when we get back home?

 

The young man in the seat before me, head

full of zigzagging tight braids says,

 

Sure you can dig up that ballot box in Florida

and while you’re at it look up all the bones

buried in the Everglades, repeats it

 

for the amusement of the woman across from him,

who knows a presidential failure like she knows herself,

and when we pass my accident on the road points

and whistles, snickers:  Bet you no one walked away from that one.

 

For this, and for all these things: praise

 

to the white plains of Wyoming, highway coiled

like a length of rime-colored rope; to snow

broiling in the sunlight so that the landscape

takes on a nuclear glow, so bright

 

we have to shield our eyes from it. Praise

for myself playing at morbidity

because I thought I had a right to it

 

as if flesh had to follow spirit

to such a pure depth the bones themselves

could not rest but must be broken, nerves

singed then ripped out, the heart clenched madly in its chest.

 

As if I had nothing except this white earth, this

smashed car to praise

 

what I knew before and know

even better now, the hills

cold as a hip bone and tufted with ice. Praise

to my youth and to my age, praise

 

to ambition and small-mindedness,

the kind I recognize and the kind

I am soon to recognize; praise

 

to self-hatred for it keeps me alive, and praise

for the splinters of delight that can pierce it.

Praise for wood pole, praise for glass.

Praise for muscle, praise for bone.

 

The sky is bright as a bowl on a nurse’s table today.

 

And the sun gleams into it as our bus slides by,

the light of us a wash of gold illuminating

bodies lost, bodies regained; gleaming

 

like my heart here, on this earth,

bloody and still beating.

Paisley Rekdal, "Ode" from The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. 

A Necessary Fiction

Notes on reading eros: the bittersweet by anne carson

He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing--oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking 

is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead--or almost

I seem to me.

Sappho, fragment 31

"It is a poem about the lover's mind in the act of constructing desire for itself."

"There are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible. . . . The difference between what is and what could be is visible."

***

"A space must be maintained or desire ends."

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,

high on the highest branch and the applepickers

     forgot--

well, no they didn't forget--were not able to reach

. . .

Sappho, fragment 105a

"The poem is incomplete, perfectly."

". . . this poem acts out the experience of eros. . . . Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several thins about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)."

***

"Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can."

***

"Words do have edges. So do you."

"There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. The seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. . . . All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you know see.Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual."

"Desire changes the lover. . . . The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before."

***

"In writing, beauty prefers an edge."

***

"Let us superimpose on the question 'What does the lover want from love' the questions 'What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer's desire?' Novels are the answer."

***

"To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist's aim."

"Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love."

***

"All lovers believe they are inventing love."

"The novelists who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing."

***

"Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is not literally there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is. . . . and what could be. . . . From within letters, Eros acts."

***

"As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges--toward something else, something not yet grasped. The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so."

***

"Sokrates' central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Sokrates says (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul."

"When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you are meant to be."

***

"In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. . . . When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires."