Woman On My Lips

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat’st with dreams; -- how can this be?--
With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing.

-- Shakespeare, "The Winter’s Tale"

I was the greater fool
who thought you breathed
and pined for me on
that bed I reeled to reach.
Walked too many miles
down that broken shore
alone, my voice more naked
than the white sands
of that beach, my song
more blue than the surf
that spring day I swore
to find you. As if real
breakers could dissolve
the vanish in your curves!
Or that some wavelike
passion raised your
stabbing nails of sweetness
back from that dead terrain
where I had heaped, like
corpses, all the nights
I couldn’t find you
where my heart
swore you reclined. What
I’ve salvaged from
my ruination in a trope
is that your initmacy
is pure intimation,
the lucency beyond
each fragrant
kiss, a surflike hiss
expiring into that
which no clench may
ever fully crash and
recede, alike as loaves
and fishes in the
miracle of that love
no love may fully kiss.
You aren’t an untouched
body but my embodied
reach from this shore
toward a mythic strand
where every Yseult
rouses her half-drowned
sea-weedy man,
my ache’s Tristanning
which shipwrecks
all purpose in one
unmanning wave and
leaves me where
no compass sail or
rudder of my mind
can ever find. You
aren’t the wings but
their necessity, the
sweet hot flash
inside the insdes
of fused loins. Yours
is the gaze which
in passing pierces me
then is gone,
leaving me to figure
out who’d read my
name then tossed it
back, hot for bigger
game. Your absence
is the pure invitation of
every inward-swinging
door; your smile the
length of that always
self-evicting digression.
What remains to say
of you is unsayable
in this poem and
so fragrant and
flagrantly blue
in the the next,
where surely I’ll
beach at last
on your apple island
where all is
pale and pearly pink
to death and you
are all I cannot name
much less conclude,
and all I ever wished
for with my face flat
in the aching well,
the woman on my
lips whose name
I can’t recall, beckoning
inside the next wave’s
bright booming farewell.

-- Oct. 22, 2004