February 3: Agape

[February Feels Like]

I want to touch her.

Once. Again. I will wait

if I must. Outwait.

Wait so long she will age,

pull even, pass. How

will she like it then if

when I bend to kiss wrinkles

ray out around her

mouth? I want to hold her.

In the flesh. All night.

Flesh like the bright

puffs the flower-god

puts on in spring, flimsy

for needing to last

but this one flashing 

circuit through her

apparitions. Did she fear,

when I stood with the

precipice at my back

and beckoned, that I was a specter

she would plunge through?

At the agape love's addicts

lie back, drink, listen

to a priestess discourse 

on love rightly understood.

As soon as cured anyone

can get up and go over

and bestow the Kiss

on anyone. Now the others

have disappeared—maybe

cured, probably joining lips

behind doors. It is

the Fourth Cup—the hour

for the breaking of the 

transubstantiated body.

What if we break, the priestess

and I, the body

together? And I fall

in fear and longing? And

she commands me to 

dissolve in the light 

of love rightly understood,

or if I can't, to put

a gun to my head? I don't want

to know that on the other

side of the pillow nobody

stirs. I don't want ever 

again to sit up half the night

and laugh and forget not 

all of us will rejoice

like this always.

---

Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990)