for RP
when two people kissing
reinitiate each other’s foundation
—Malva Flores (trans. Jen Hofer)
all night long, the curtain was pulled back
and dawn drew me toward it, through the dark hours
in which, missing you, and feeling the strangeness
of missing you along with her, I swarmed above the pages
of a book searching for a lost syntax that could lead me
to this new form of desire, desire after obliteration,
I shouldn’t overstate this, the death of myself
when she died, I shouldn’t overstate it:
obliteration
the first time I saw you
I was already held in your arms,
we held each other standing in the grass in a storm,
it was the night my basement flooded and my house
vanished do you remember how the first time
we met we were already making love
in the rain we were already walking between
two houses at dawn we were already right here
in the early summer storm and then
you were in another city and I was already
missing you the day we met and realizing
I was in love with you the day we met you were
out of town and I met you in the dream I had
of walking by your house and looking up
just as you were opening the window
[when a lover’s mouth
reinvents a lost equation]
the first time I saw you, you were standing in the street
in front of my house and you waved hello
and said something from under your mask
the pandemic was ending soon on our block
we only had to be careful for a few more years
we didn’t touch for several more years
talking all night on the porch as we grew older
looking at our watches, turning pages on calendars
the first time I saw you, you were seconds
from being inside me for the first time
the first time I saw you I was pulling you
toward me, one foot on the earth,
one in the water, one star above us the first time
I saw you I was in a field without you
with the smell of thyme, animals wading in the river,
the heat of dusk on my skin, the air soaked with dusk-light
layered with dawn-light where we met for the first time
laughing nervously because we hadn’t slept
and we heard the birds beginning to fill with sound
[how a lover’s voice
reignites a new sensation]
you were remarkable
we were going to make love
for the first time and we knew it, I kept seeing
you at each moment for the first time and never
wanted this to end, resisted the urge
to know the end, I want to learn a different way to
love I always want you I always want to
see you for the first time and meet you
for the first time every time I wake up beside you
each morning resisting an anxiety I carry
under the surface of my skin because I am falling
in love for the first time and seeing you for the first
time each time I see you and I know the cost of love
and yet poured forth this wish and yet couldn’t
have imagined you which is why I float in the half-night
sleepwalking with my eyes open
a sight that frightens even the animals
wading in the river and the butterflies
landing on my face who try to close my eyes for me
I tell them I’m on fire, that I carry love now
under my skin, that the love in me obliterated
me when she died and now it’s rebirthing
me into myself, this my own return
to my own transmuted bedrock the way
the way we touch becomes its own occasion
—Cass Donish (COMP: an interdisciplinary journal)