White of snow or white of page is not
the white of your skin, for skin, except
when truly albino, always has some other color
sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf,
a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting
stream, a richness implied of its many layers,
the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity
that lies within and makes the skin shed, not
like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden
cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge
of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment
while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing
seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid
ease of being—one resting upon the other,
the sliver of your shoulder against the black
fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty
that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed
(as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga
whales came swimming toward me—how white
they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant
and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent
as white fire, gliding through the weight of water,
and when they sang in that chamber as small
as the chambers of the human heart, murky
with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments
of what they had consumed, I was almost in love
with them; they seemed the lost children
of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins
a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other
of all the existences they had left behind, their fins
like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling
like canaries of the sea: there was no darkness
in their bodies, like clouds drifting through
unkempt skies, they illuminated the room).
So I did not think of you so much as I felt you
drifting through my being, in some gesture
that held me poised like a hummingbird above
the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you
above the heart, and by above I mean there,
not that geometric center, the breastbone
that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake
for the place where the heart lies, but the exact
location, a little to the left, just on the crescent
where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know
all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing,
the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin
and night that opens in imagination and in feeling
upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above
the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could
kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head
of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where
angels were once believed to dance, and all that
nakedness without could not have been
except for all that burning deep within
Copyright Credit: Rebecca Seiferle, "White of snow or white of page is not" from Wild Tongue. Copyright © 2007 by Rebecca Seiferle. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Wild Tongue (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)