Kiss

as opposed to "the kiss"

like Ann Frank, I am separated from you,

in a booth, nervously lifted away, up the dark steps of

a nightclub. much like we discover

we are the weeping lamb, easy wild horse 

weary of the trough. it was like missing

half a lung under a tent of Degas' paintings

with our book length poems woven in the

sometimes miracle of an old country road.

saffron moebius winter howling and you

running out of Marlborough's have way to your 

mothers farm

from which these excerpts, I imagine, are taken

since a kiss is a kind of rebellion. a form of

banner shamming the universe in a dark alley

in Detroit. wetlands inhabit us. animals

thirsting for droplets under the leaves of trees;

for so long I thought that dew memorialized 

certain life experiences

that you could point backwards

at the world your leaving like a novelist

points at a battlefield he has never visited.

that oceans and rivers, while we wait,

finding forms, throwing boughs and

beached turtles back into the sea

that gave them up. cathedrals I have

tagged with starlike gesturing like the

schoolkid of my youth. Kiss me now,

hollow sextant, before this 

flock of unswerving mammals and birds.