If, as Rumi once wrote, The price
of kissing is my life: at least
this morning, let me not think
about all that there is too
much of— the weight of living
accrued in collapsible boxes,
all the kisses that have morphed
into deeds and contracts, the kisses
now overlaid with the smell of musty
evenings in old countries, those
that smack of the toil that comes
of trying to sweeten others’ days—
Surely there is room for some plain,
no-strings-attached kissing, surely
a way to modulate the hum of that one
cicada in the trees so its voice lifts,
doesn’t merely drown, in a chorus of other
insistent voices? Surely there must be a way
to lengthen the echoes of light sifting
in the leaves and through damp lattices
of neighbors’ fences; to dwell without
rancor or remorse in moments when I
might press my face against your nape
to catch that drifting note—
unnameable, unmistakable, stirring
even my sorrows into fragrance.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Reprieve
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
Like this setting of the heavy and contractual athwart the light, the light!
Surely there must be a way… /…to dwell without/rancor or remorse in moments when I /might press my face against your nape/to catch that drifting note—/unnameable, unmistakable, stirring/even my sorrows into fragrance.
THE JUDGMENT
It is the way of beauty and of virtue you require,
the canon forgotten in our striving for the wind.
Come hither, anyway, hide your pain in the cup
of my hands, find that reprieve from a judgment
of endlessly inchoate loving, and let your heart
rest from its ceaseless running. Escape stops here.
Should I then pledge fealty to being your gaoler?
Should I find you an open cage to freely return to?
But these will only be tethers that must bind you
when all you pray for is to be loved and unafraid.
Now, therefore, with all my courage, and all
that I can grant, I absolve you from this price
of laying your life down for the countless kisses
you have given and not taken any in return.
—Albert B. Casuga
08-02-11