Kissing Again

by Dorianne Laux

Kissing again, after a long drought of not kissing--too many
kids, bills, windows
needing repair. Sex, yes, though squeezed in between the minor
depths of anger, despair--
standing up amid the laundry or fumbling onto the strip of rug
between the coffee table
and the couch. Quick, furtive, like birds, a dance on the wing,
but no time for kissing,
the luxuriant tonguing of another spongy tongue, the deft flicking
and feral sucking,
that prolonged lapping that makes a smooth stone of the brain.
To be lost in it,
your body tumbled in sea waves, no up or down, just salt
and the liquid swells
set in motion by the moon, by a tremor in Istanbul, the waft
of a moth wing
before it plows into a halo of light, a deep lustrous kiss that lasts
minutes, blossoms
into what feels like days, fields of tulips glossy with dew, low purple
clouds piling in
beneath the distant arch of a bridge. One after another they storm
your lips, each kiss
a caress, autonomous and alive, spilling into each other, streams
into creeks into rivers
that brunt and break upon the gorge. Let the tongue, in its wisdom,
release its stores,
let the mouth, tired of talking, relax into its meant shapes of give
and receive, its plush
swelling, its slick round reveling, its primal reminiscence that knows
only the one robust world.

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Dorianne Laux (ZYZZYVA 5, 8, 16, 20, 30, 36, 57) is the director of the University of Oregon’s Program in Creative Writing. Her new collection, Music in the Morning, will be published this fall by BOA Editions. E-mail: dlaux@darkwing.uoregon.edu