by Brian Turner
A slim, elegant young man is running his hands over the golden sepulcher protecting the body of the great-granddaughter of the Prophet, dead for more than a thousand years, and then he runs his hands over his face as if to transfer the magic. Stooped figures are walking up to the glowing box that encases the shroud and kissing it, kissing it, as if to pour their hearts into this long-vanished girl of four.
For forty-one years now, I’ve been traveling the world, in large part to see people give themselves over to what they adore. The black-hatted men pressing into the corners of the Western Wall to confide their secrets—their prayers—to the ancient stones, the pilgrims carrying toy cars and bathtubs over the mountains to a shaman priest outside a cathedral in Bolivia. The white-robed figures walking for weeks to the cut-rock churches of Lalibela, the faces reflected, gleaming, in the flickering candles of the Jokhang Temple.
But never have I seen a sensual intensity and beauty to rival what I’ve found in Islam. Taxi drivers in Isfahan recite the verses of Rumi, hymning a love that leaves him senseless and intoxicated; their cousins in Syria, eyes closed, breath heaving, cluster before first light at the graves of long-dead saints, bereft; even the roughest men in Damascus allow their hearts to break and bring their lips to a grille in homage and supplication. If you want to see what true love is, go—even if, as in my case, you’re a Hindu from the U.S.—to the Shiite mosques in Sunni Syria and watch in silence.
A kiss, you see, can carry not just a heart in it, but a soul.
INTERLUDE
Kim Addonizio
For some reason, young, sometimes young and drunk, strangers are drawn to me. That night I was at a club in New York with my brother Gary, listening to jazz. I stepped outside with a hitter of pot he’d handed me. I sheltered from the rain under a small overhang and lit up, then stood a few minutes longer, watching the lit needles of rain dissolving into Sixth Avenue. A twenty-something blond boy veered over. He was Norwegian, he said, and visiting the city alone. He was adorable and also, clearly, wasted. I was several decades older, but there was no mistaking the fact that he was flirting with me.
“So, what are you doing the rest of the night?” he asked.
“I have to go back inside to my boyfriend,” I lied. I had no boyfriend. I was wondering if I’d ever have one again. When you are a woman over sixty, even one who looks, if I may say so, pretty damned good, the boyfriends are scarce. How long had it been since I’d kissed a man? Let’s just call it a while. As for the rest of what might naturally follow a kiss between two lonely people—let’s call it a long while. I have several women friends near my age who are counting it in years; one has a decade under her belt. So to speak. “My life is over,” she wailed recently. This is an exceedingly smart, talented, witty, lovely woman. She makes me desperately wish we were both gay. Unfortunately for us, we are drawn to people with penises.
And here was one swaying before me, ready for a night on the town. I could have taken him home and had my way with him, but what did I really want? Let’s call it more than an inebriated fuck. Let’s go ahead and call it love, real love, the kind I’d experienced more than once in my life, and missed now.
So here I was, pleasantly stoned, about to blow off this guy instead of blow him, or worse.
Then I had an impulse.
I took his face in my hands and kissed him on his pillowy Norwegian lips. They were cold, and tasted like beer and rain. He closed his eyes in delight. I closed mine, too, our bodies a few inches apart, the faint sounds of the band mixing with passing voices and tires on wet asphalt.
How long did it last? Less than a minute. A few of his molecules waltzed into my mouth; a few of mine whirled into his. Then I turned and ran back inside.
Later, I thought about Chekhov’s mournful Officer Ryabovich in “The Kiss,” who remembers his “little adventure” with a stranger in a dark room. First he thinks the kiss will change his life; then he concludes it was trivial, and is confirmed in his own sense of inadequacy. Finally the world seems “an unintelligible, aimless jest.”
The world often strikes me the same way. But I prefer to find the joke funny. And to believe, in the weird and sometimes happy accidents that result—in this case—in kissing a beautiful stranger in the rain. It didn’t really change anything, but it wasn’t trivial. It was one of those encounters that rises up out of nowhere and sinks back into it, giving off light and energy as it goes. It reminded me that my life isn’t over. That we can’t know what’s next. Let’s call that a reason to be happy, alone, enjoying a night out with a brother you love, listening to musicians improvise over the changes.
THE KISS I WOULD HAVE SPENT ON YOU
Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown
I finally had the courage to turn on Kurt’s computer in September. He had passed away in June, and Steve Huff, the editor and publisher of Tiger Bark Press, had asked me to find Kurt’s poetry files, in order to publish his posthumous collection, I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: Poems Selected and New. A mellow sun filled his room, the curtains open as he always left them—the small bronze abstract sculpture we had bought at an artists’ market in Provence next to the pile of books, Jim Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad, Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Charles Simic’s My Noiseless Entourage, and a bilingual edition of François Villon’s The Legacy & the Testament, by his reading chair.
As I sat at his desk, a graying woman stared back at me from the black mirror of Kurt’s computer monitor, her left hand clasped against her lips at the thought of opening his files. I turned the computer on and, though filled with hesitation, soon discovered a file called “Almost Poems,” which was comprised of about eighty to ninety poems, all in alphabetical order—some in very early stages of draft, some unfinished, others almost done. I read through them avidly, one poem after another. Hundreds of lines I had never seen:
I’m thinking of your eyes, following each word now / as I write this, / as I place words end-to-end with other words to build a bridge, a sentence / over nothing. / We both are children once again, / stepping out into a field of snow . . .
I can hear Kurt’s voice when I read these words. And I’m transported by this field of snow to the years we lived in Snowmass Village, Colorado, sometimes cut off from the main roads by snowstorms and whiteouts that lasted for days, and for which we were secretly thankful.
There is a place in which beauty will not die, / timeless Eden where memory lies down / with desire and age is only a dream. / Where flesh is immortal, and willing, and warm.
Kurt and I loved listening to music together. I remember often listening to the Romanian Women’s Choir, or to Chants D’Auvergne by Canteloube. We’d sit, not saying much, sipping wine, and, yes, for an instant, feeling ageless, and willing, and warm.
The body is but a visible portion of the soul, like thoughts, whose surrogates are words. / And when thoughts dry up, words are dust / whipping across imagination’s grave.
Then I opened “The Kiss.”
Read it, reread it, read it again.
I don’t quite remember how fast or blurry-eyed my drive was to Arroyo Burro Beach, about five minutes from our house. But I do remember standing knee-deep in the ocean, as close as I could be to the black, split rock next to which I had dispersed most of Kurt’s ashes. It was high tide—I couldn’t quite reach “his” rock. And I remember I very quietly wept there, elated, brokenhearted, thankful, and full of sorrow.
THE KISS
for Laure-Anne
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
The kiss I would have spent on you is still
there, within me. It will probably die there.
But it will be the last of me to die.
BAZOOKA SMACKDOWN
Patricia Smith
There were two ways up and down Schurz High School. The front stairs were lit insanely, huge banks of fluorescence unleashed to bathe scurrying students in a blinding blue. I took the creaky and shadowed back
stairs when I tired of being the school’s official colored girl, when I wanted to get in a little weep between classes, when I was late again for algebra and its confounding reams of hokum.
The back stairs, also unofficially known as “Make-Out Row,” was where young love—in all its overwrought, conjectural glory—went to messily implode. In the shadows were hitched and squirming bodies, rushed and fevered hands. There was much smacking and slurp, the moist sound track of curiosity’s little engine.
But the knowledge of all that fluid being exchanged didn’t register in any carnal way. I was fifteen, scrawny, and bumbling. The dozen black students, in a class of eight hundred, were publicly derided as love (or lust) interests—we walked those halls like little raised fists, portents of the world outside pushing to get in. It was 1970. We were enthralling and terrifying.
One Tuesday, when Make-Out Row was eerily unoccupied, I was rushing down while Dan Mikros (his name has been changed to protect the dull-witted) rushed up. Dan Mikros with the exactly two errant mud-brown hairs popping from the jut in his chin. Dan Mikros, that chin peppered with whiteheads (haha) and scarlet blotch. Dan Mikros, linebacker, thick head, thick neck, thick chest, and all the stupid that suggests. Dan Mikros, usually huddled outside a bank of lockers with other Bulldogs, making a snarl face and hissing the n-word whenever hive mind mustered the guts. Dan Mikros, who suddenly saw his chance to covertly integrate the Row, striking a blow for civil rights while answering the question his fidgety dreams couldn’t stop asking.
My head was down, as usual. (All through high school, I was not a fan of eyes.) I moved to pass him, and a thick hand, nails bitten to blood, pressed resolutely against my chest. I lost my balance, stumbling backward into one of the Row’s prized crevices, and then his open mouth was on my face. That boy damned well knew the clock was ticking. So he made me know that frenzied mouth—the morning’s Bazooka, flecks of tobacco, a vague eggish stench, and spit, sluggish like an oil across my tongue. His ham hand pumped my budding left breast like it was trying to extract information from a mute prisoner.
I knew this knee-jerk tryst was the biggest risk of Dan Mikros’s muscle-headed little life, and when his bedeviled thing went kapow! behind his zipper, I was all the reason. I shoved him, hawked admirably, and watched my spittle drip from a stunned blue eye and cascade through a pimpled landscape of cheek and chin. I hissed, hefted my little fist, and mused for a second about the consequences of bringing it down.
Then I brought it down.
THE SUMMONS
Mark Doty
Suppose you made a taxonomy of kisses, in their vast variety: the kiss on the cheek of a child heading out for the day, the kiss on the forehead you give a friend departing after she’s unburdened herself in a long conversation, the complex vocabulary of kisses between the long-coupled, who signal through them a host things. But those aren’t the kisses you really want to study.
Could you name the kisses of lovers, distinguishing their nuances, the shades of passion? You would like to do the research for this. But then you realize it’s what you have been doing, what you are doing, what you plan to do.
A catalogue of kisses, each one documented by a sentence, a sketch, or a photograph. It could be digitized, like Emily Dickinson’s herbarium in the exhibit at the Morgan Library; touch the stems or leaves you like on the screen and a new window shows you Latin and common names, uses, culture, references to the plant in her poetry. But in the great album of kisses, the master text, there would have to be so much room! The sorts of kisses which are invitations, their degree of fervor indicating greater urgency or intensity. The lips-shut small kiss you give to the shut lips of a man heading out your door in the morning when you don’t plan to see him more than just this once, and you know he’s already made the same decision. The different sort of closed-lip small kiss you give him when it’s his apartment you’re leaving. Is there room, in the imaginarium, for the kisses you’ve withheld? Because they wouldn’t have been welcomed? Or you were afraid they would be welcome, and promised too much, and then you’d somehow have to make room for that? Or the kiss withheld because you knew someone wanted it, and you weren’t about to give him that?
When used to kiss me I felt he was hitting my mouth, striking at me with the teeth beneath his lips. Why didn’t I stop him?
My mother’s kiss, when it came, seemed to carry with it a small disturbance of air which carried her scents: a floral soap from Mexico, lipstick, coffee, a bracing whiff of alcohol from the neck of a just-opened bottle of vodka.
The first time I kissed we were standing on a fire escape, at night, behind an old hotel, and there were freight cars moving on the tracks beneath us, tracks that spread in all directions into the snow.
You’re just warming up to the one kiss you really want to talk about.
When that kiss comes, it doesn’t matter that you’ve known him for a few years, in an easy way: lightweight, sexy, and pleasant, something breezy about it, as if he blew in now and then on a wind arrived from a climate where gravity doesn’t work as hard as it seems to in New York. He’s always seemed young, not attached to anything much, though perhaps that’s because he just hasn’t told you much. You always like him, his freshness and his enthusiasm for pleasure, which is why you keep seeing him again, though the expectation’s just for a few bright hours.
And then, as we say, out of the blue, out of nowhere, without anything obvious changing, something shifts, imperceptibly but clearly, like the atmosphere after a storm: magnetic charge, ions, something in the clockworks. There’s a newly opened space, an aperture in which the kiss can take place. You’re lying together, face-to-face and half undressed, you’ve done this many times, but the unexpected way your torsos fall into each other, unwilled, is the overture, and as your faces come together the kiss, before it’s a kiss, is a fuse that begins a long burn, a nearly visible black sparkle traversing more of a distance than you’d imagine, coiling its way through the space between you in two directions, into his chest as well as into yours. Hello, light and heat, hello, next-ness, and then
his beauty laid out like an entire field of candles in yellow grass. You saw it before but never saw it, not all lit like this. Hello.
His beauty an explosion inside a clear room at the bottom of the ocean, the shock wave just now reaching you,
beauty the defining character of his body, but not resident there only, connected instead to something larger, above him, free-floating cloud, suddenly ours in common, and from there spilling down into me, until I’m lit up also, a cove of small waves crested by phosphorus.
The kiss is immense, although you understand at once—not a thought exactly, more a felt understanding—that its intimacy is what allows for this tremendous scale. Does the kiss even have an edge? It goes on, in every way; why would you want it to stop, except to take stock a second, to catch your breath so you can dive into that wave again?
And go under, and dive again.
It takes a while to know that the space in which you live, the element in which your body moves, has changed. From here on out? With each immersion, you are less contained. To be that desired, what is that? To have that opening, that entrance awaiting you, to know it’s there. To dissolve the edges of you, that it isn’t just the mouth, just the body, that is opened by the kiss.
From the first moment you know that the kiss is a fact, as real as this table and chair, both utter promise and total trouble. If this is in the world, this possibility, if you know the address of such a place, where the flaming meadow and the light-edged wavelets dwell in the late hours together, where his beauty is the solvent in which you both are dissolved and remade in the crazy furnace of the kiss, why would you want to be anywhere else? It’s an imperative, a summons, a bell. And what are you going to do about that?
THE SECRET KISS
Ilyse Kusnetz
This is a kiss that happens in secret. A smoky kiss. I press into it—sometimes a desperate fumbling, at other times calculating and de
liberate. Each time, I wonder what it says about me. But then I look in the mirror at the wreckage left to me: the wild, thinning hair; the swollen face; the body misshapen by so many treatments and drugs—radiation, chemo, steroids, drugs to aid memory, drugs for nausea, drugs for pain, drugs for the side effects the other drugs bring.
Sometimes it’s an ache, a violent cramping in my stomach that drives me to press my lips around the smooth glass and kiss. Lately it’s my bones, as if I’m trying to fill the space inside them, sharp and crumbling. The tumors on the PET scan look like radioactive snowballs tucked into vertebrae and ribs, liver and lungs. I close my eyes and see them glowing.
Sometimes this kiss is the only relief I can find, and I believe in its healing power. And yet, self-recrimination is never far away. It’s still a forbidden lip-lock, and with each inhalation that takes me closer to letting go, part of me wonders if I’ve become like one of Odysseus’s lotus eaters, or if this is somehow just a fast track toward drowning in the River Lethe. Is it okay to check out, I ask the air—to kiss my pain away with such verdant fervor? Such kisses once sparked passion and signified defiance, but this trembling need is something else entirely.
In the Netherlands recreational marijuana is frowned upon by the general populace, but there’s no stigma attached if you have a medical condition. It’s recognized as medicine. You’re not a pothead if you’re genuinely sick. But I want to defend my kiss even further: I wish a good death to the Puritan inside of me who believes suffering clarifies the soul. I push away my doubts.
