WEBVTT

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I'm just going to
read three more poems,

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and then I'll be done.

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This is about an interview
I had with a priest.

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That was the occasion,
in memory of this.

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The title of the
poem is "The Kiss."

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It's set in the
1960s, early 1960s.

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"The mossy transom light, odors
of cabbage and ancient papers,

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while Father Feeney polishes
an apple on his tunic.

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I tell him I want the life
priests have, not how the night

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sky's millions of
departing stars,

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erased by city lights,
terrify me toward God.

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That some nights
I sleepwalk, curl

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inside the bathtub,
and bang awake

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from a dream of walking
through a night where

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candle beams crisscross the
sky, a movie premiere somewhere.

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Where am I, Father,
when I visit a life

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inside or outside
the one I'm in?

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In our wronged world, I
see things accidentally

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good, fishy shadows thrown
by walnut leaves, summer

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hammerheads whomping
fireplugs, fall air that

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tastes like spring
water, oranges, and iron.

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"What are you running
from, my dear,

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at morning mass
five times a week?"

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He comes around the desk, it's
failing flowers and Iwo Jima

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inkwell, holding
his breviary, it's

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bee's hum mysteries in a
Latin whose patterned noise,

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like blades on ice, became a
cranky poetry I was lost to.

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Beautiful dreamer,
how I love you.

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When he leans down, his
hands, rough with chalk dust,

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rasp my ears.

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"You don't have the
call," kissing my cheek.

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"Find something else."

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On the subway home, I
found a Golgotha air

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with piss and smoke, sleepy
workers, Cuban missiles

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drooping in their
evening papers,

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and Black people hosed down
by cops or stretched by dogs.

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What was I running from?

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Deity flashed on the
razor a boy beside me

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wagged and stroked
the hair of the nurse

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who waked to kiss her rosary.

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I believed the wall's filthy
cracks, coming into focus

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when we stopped, held
stories I'd find and tell.

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What are you running from,
child of what I've become?

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Tell what you know now of
dreadful freshness and want,

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our stunned world peopled
by shadows solidly flesh,

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a silted fountain of prayer
rising in my throat."

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