The Kiss
The mossy transom light, odors of cabbage
and ancient papers, while Father Feeney
polishes an apple on his tunic.
I tell him I want the life priests have,
not how the night sky’s millions
of departing stars, erased by city lights,
terrify me toward God. That some nights
I sleepwalk, curl inside the tub,
and bang awake from a dream of walking through
a night where candle beams crisscross
the sky, a movie premiere somewhere.
Where am I, Father, when I visit a life
inside or outside the one I’m in?
In our wronged world I see things
accidentally good: fishy shadows thrown
by walnut leaves, summer hammerheads
whomping fireplugs, fall air that tastes
like spring water, oranges, and iron.
“What are you running from, my dear,
at morning mass five times a week?”
He comes around the desk, its failing flowers
and Iwo Jima inkwell, holding his breviary,
its Latin mysteries a patterned noise
like blades on ice, a small-voiced poetry
or sorcery. Beautiful dreamer,
how I love you. When he leans down,
his hands rough with chalk dust
rasp my ears. “You don't have the call,”
kissing my cheek. “Find something else.”
On the subway home I found
a Golgotha air of piss and smoke,
sleepy workers, Cuban missiles drooping
in their evening papers, with black people
hosed down by cops or stretched by dogs.
What was I running from? Deity flashed
on the razor a boy beside me wagged,
it stroked the hair of the nurse who waked
to kiss her rosary. I believed the wall’s
filthy cracks, coming into focus
when we stopped, held stories I'd find
and tell. What are you running from,
child of what I’ve become?
Tell what you know now
of dreadful freshness and want,
our stunned world peopled
by shadows solidly flesh,
a silted fountain of prayer
rising in our throat.
Copyright Credit: W. S. Di Piero, “The Kiss” from Brother Fire. Copyright © 2004 by W. S. Di Piero. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: Brother Fire: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)