The Kiss (2004)

...Alpha continues to begin,
Omega is refreshed at every end.

-- Wallace Stevens,
"An Ordinary Evening
in New Haven"

Orpheus didn't lose his
beloved in hell,
he failed to retrieve
his song of her.
The music which hallowed
her pale hair for all time
turned hollow inside
him, the night turning
rude and cold as
brute winds whistled
tunelessly through her
ribs. Rilke went down
there for years in
search of his Elegies,
lost in 1914: a sudden
great flapping lost just
a beat and then disappeared,
his poems turning
weary and poor, none
he carved after
cathedral enough
to recapture her sound.
How was it she smiled
one day in the full
wonderment of wheat
and unveil to a kiss
in the hymeneals of
spring and just
falter that brush,
withering and draining
to a bold blotchy
winter filled with those
bad nights no
other oblivion can
garrot enough.Insomniac,
lonely, horny, with
history whispering
up from the vents --
How could it all
end right there on
the iciest banks of Hell?
My cap and bells are lined
with red velour, scarlet
like the bright satin maw
of a vampire's black cape.
I chase every poem's
fancy to the highest
sea-cliff where she always
get lost in the wind's wail
and roar of the river too
far below. The sea mauls
and mashes the end
of every love song.
We never get her back
though we die trying.
I sail forever toward her
turn to me that spring day,
singer and song cupping
the shapes of her bliss,
our forfeit that quatrain
which ends with a kiss.