Next, a poem is a title poem of a book
I wrote about six years ago.
It's called "Touch."
A movie was made called Touch, but I can't sue them
for stealing my title because apparently you
have to claim more than a one-word title.
Pity, I could be rich.
Wouldn't need to give poetry readings, anything--
[LAUGHS]
I use one word that might be unfamiliar here.
This is a word--
a pogrom, which can be pronounced
poh-grum, which is when in czarist Russia,
the Cossacks would go into the Jewish ghettos
and beat up and kill Jews.
It's about getting into bed with somebody.
"Touch."
You are already asleep.
I lower myself in next to you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint of habits, the patina of self,
the black frost of outsideness, so that even
unclothed it is a resilient chilly hardness,
a superficially malleable, dead rubbery texture.
You are a mound of bedclothes, where the cat in sleep
graces its paws against your calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.
Meanwhile and slowly, I feel a--
is it my own warmth surfacing or the ferment
of your whole body that in darkness beneath the cover
is stealing bit by bit to break down that chill.
You turn and hold me tightly, do you
know who I am or am I your mother or the nearest
human being to hold on to in a dreamed pogrom?
What I, now loosened, sink into is an old big place,
it is there already, for you are already there,
and the cat got there before you, yet it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is not found but seeps from our touch
in continuous creation, dark enclosing cocoon
around ourselves alone, dark wide realm where
we walk with everyone.