If Not Here, Where?

If not here, where?
I gasped, my hand
half down her jeans,
almost there, almost free—

But we were sitting
round folding tables
in my ninth grade
English class (I’m not
dreaming here folks
this is history)
discussing Homer’s
Odyssey.

What time or room
had we to proceeed?
She hissed Not Here,
to which I could only
gulp the lava and
fire back Where?

Well, she never said,
& so in a day or two
my lust ravened
on toward other
nippled fonts.

That’s Poetry. Today
this entreaty, this wave,
tomorrow some other
vexing scree. But today,
this mount: why pair
verse with that 14
year old nurse of
my budding lust?

Sweating at some table
while voice above droned
round Circe’s isle and
below my hand inched
closer to a mons of fire.

The sense of desire
mounting possibility
against the certainty
of refusal, heights
grown slippery,
perilous, penultimate,

as if only the gasp
of yes could ever do,
and it worth the
entire predictable
tumble hair nose and
eyeballs to the
gorges of this page,
end of the poem,
another failed ingress.

But who cares! For
three seconds I was so
close, the air tense
and bright, my fingers
under the softest
fabric and brushing
fine hairs steaming
with white fire.

O evanescence,
my trellis rising
and falling from
a sound, the scent
of the sea.

Tomorrow I’ll be back.