Vocation

Is it poetry I’m after at those moments when

I must clothe your hands in mine or comfort your shoulders

—so bare and neglected sometimes when we wake—

or press your mouth to taste its uncurling flower?

Is that which seems so fleshly and truthful merely

a twisted track into words, a way to leave you

for your image? Art is tempting, a colorful

infidelity with the self, and doubly feigning

when what is repossessed secretly by one

was made by two. And I wish I could pour a poetry-vodka

into twin glasses we’d gulp unanimously

(“I poison myself for your health” the appropriate toast)

but only a poet would have acquired the taste

for such a strange distillation; you’d never warm

to heavy-petting dactyls, the squeak and creak

from locked, suburban stanzas. And so my fingers,

dancing alone, are less than content. They perceive

how they have clung to moral adolescence.

Their vocation now could be simply to talk to your skin,

to take you at kissing-time; later, to close your eyes

by stroking the lashes lightly over cheekbones

flushed with some high, bright, childish fever, and so

write the poem in the touch-shapes of darkness

and let it end there . . . They are on the tip of trusting

this silent, greyish room, its astonishing view

fading from metaphor to the life with you.