KISSES FROM THE INSIDE
He has invented a way of guiding
the blind woman so they can step exactly
together. As she is not led, so is he rapid
and ingenious with me. I am like a house lost
in the woods of Soto
whose upper floors are occupied by gypsies.
They braid red yarn into my hair
and light my shadow with candles to keep me
all in light. He wants me all in light,
she who was stumbling three years
with the dead. He picks my feet up
by their heels in his palm. The more
I want to be high and golden, pitiless and
unformed, the more he tears me back
to earth. He rolls me in the red dust
inside the night. Even his kisses
stroke my unwinding from the inside.
The bees fly off from their honey,
their unspeakable frenzies.
In the hovering noon of our devotional midnights
he flies off, until I am sheer and stolen,
rooted deep in the sea air
because the tide is everything
because the tide is everything
and I have never seen the sea.
Tess Gallagher
