April 10: The Archipelago of Kisses
Martha
The Archipelago of Kisses
Jeffrey McDaniel
for Sarah Koskoff and Todd Louiso
We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don’t grow on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you’re sixteen it’s easy—like being unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There’s the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn’t be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you’d quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You’ll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. Now if you
were younger, you’d pull over, slide open the mouth’s ruby door just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances together, you get a smile; rub two smiles, you get
a spark; rub two sparks together and you have a kiss. Now what? Don’t invite the kiss over
to your house and answer the door in your underwear. It’ll get suspicious and stare at your toes.
Don’t water the kiss with whisky. It’ll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it’ll be ashamed and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye,
and you’ll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Dim the lights, notice how it illuminates the room. Clutch it to your chest,
wonder if the sand inside every hourglass comes from a special beach. Place it on the tongue’s pillow,
then look up the first recorded French kiss in history: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1300 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the earth
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
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More Jeffrey McDaniel:
+ The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy
+ The Quiet World
More kissing:
+ I Know Someone, Mary Oliver
+ To the Couple Lingering on the Doorstep, Deborah Landau
Sink to the bottom of the lake of poems sent on this date in:
2025: Tin Bucket, Jenny George
2024: The Winter Palace, Philip Larkin
2023: On Keeping Pluto a Planet, Greg Beatty
2022: The Terrible Beauty of the Reserve, Billy-Ray Belcourt
2021: Puerto Rico Goes Dark, Juan J. Morales
2020: Winter Psalm, Richard Hoffman
2019: King Kreations, Angel Nafis
2018: Letter to Larry Levis, Matthew Olzmann
2017: Only she who has breast-fed, Vera Pavlova
2016: First Love, Jan Owen
2015: At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School, Sherman Alexie
2014: Boogaloo, Kevin Young
2013: The Fist, Derek Walcott
2012: Turning, W.S. Merwin
2011: Consolation for Tamar, A.E. Stallings
2010: Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell, Marty McConnell
2009: Bike Ride with Older Boys, Laura Kasischke
2008: Let’s Move All Things (September), Denver Butson
2007: The Day Flies Off Without Me, John Stammers
2006: A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg
2005: Tortures, Wisława Szymborska