The Kiss

1939 –

2021

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

Glimpses

It’s the last few hours of a county fair,
or the ninth inning, score tied, in a small-town
high school big game, everything that’s going
to happen destined to feel inevitable.
Everett’s favorite cow has yet to win a prize,
and what occurs next on the field will likely determine
whether a certain boy, years later, will run for mayor,
or still be known as the guy who dropped the ball.
Elsewhere in the same town Pastor William
is writing down his sermon on what it takes
to live a moral life, confusing rectitude
with deprivation, and his wife’s frequent,
unapologetic nothing-for-you-tonight-

Stephen Dunn

2018

Mrs. Cavendish and the Dancer


Mrs. Cavendish desired the man in the fedora 
who danced the tarantella without regard
for who might care.  All her life she had
a weakness for abandon, and, if the music
stopped, for anyone who could turn
a phrase. The problem was
Mrs.

Stephen Dunn

2014

Here and Now

            for Barbara


        There are words
I've had to save myself from,
like My Lord and Blessed Mother,
words I said and never meant,
though I admit a part of me misses
the ornamental stateliness
of High Mass, that smell

        of incense.

Stephen Dunn

2011

Poems

The Kiss

More by this poet

Glimpses

Mrs. Cavendish and the Dancer

Here and Now

Poems

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The Kiss

More by this poet

Glimpses

Mrs. Cavendish and the Dancer

Here and Now

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