I insist, my lover. I insist
my finger softly laid against your lips;
my own tongue stopped.
There is so much I cannot say to you,
here, even, or ever. These scars of mine
that you caress with dancing fingertips,
stroking their lengths
of smooth and tender skin, they are old news
to me, though you explore them fresh;
traces of life’s landscapes long ago,
memories of dark forests
forgotten, buried, the vestiges of pain subsumed
for you to punctuate with airy kisses.
I insist, my own tongue stopped,
all missing words, all unkept promises
I will not offer you, my love, stopped up
with the breath caught in my throat.
They rise, diffuse unspoken in
the sumac-filtered sky.

I insist, my lover, I insist.
My tongue is loosed, though you may quiet it
with this soft fingertip
upon my lips. Here is more than I could ever say
to you, my words subsumed in promises
I dare not make. My scars are all unseen,
a deep-buried landscape inscribed in me,
the vestiges of long-forgotten poems
come back a sentence at a time,
as horns of stags glimpsed dimly through
the forest edges of my memory. I offer you all this:
promises yet unspoken, a stand of kisses
along your smooth scar-furrowed hip;
the breath caught in your throat, my love;
eyes held shut beneath the brightening sky;
your back an arch above this carpet
of red and fallen sumac leaves.

I insist, my lovers, I insist.
My fingers through the layered earth insist,
insinuate themselves,
through rock and clay insist themselves
each swelling season, to emerge,
to kiss the air with pinned and fingered leaves.
There is nothing I could say to you
that you would hear except this whisper,
the rubbing of old limbs, scarred where
past years’ fingers once graced them. I mend your scars,
these furrowed wastes, these gullies,
knit them together with these insistent fingers,
bind you one to the other under
each season’s leaf-kiss mantle.
The breath in both your throats will catch,
will cease,
promises kept and promises unmade dissolved
into the forest’s memory, and both of you
will settle on the patient earth, commingled,
to fade among my new-emerging shoots.

Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.

1. 
   embee 2007 10 27 at 12:51:23 pm

   Chris, this is stunning, a piece I’ll return to again and again. Aching, intimate beauty. Thank you.

   And, Warren, thanks to you, too; I’ve been looking for a way to say exactly that. Our tongues are stopped, indeed.  Like the silence in the auditorium after the curtain falls on a stunning theatrical piece:  no one wants to break the spell with the harshness of clapping.

2. 
   black dog barking 2007 10 27 at 1:30:31 pm

   promises kept and promises unmade dissolved
   into the forest’s memory,

   And promises there’s still time to make and keep. Thanks for the reminder.

3. 
   Rob G 2007 10 27 at 3:00:50 pm

   This is about Giuliani and Romney running for president, right?

4. 
   beth 2007 10 27 at 6:44:14 pm

   It’s beautiful, Chris.

5. 
   Theriomorph 2007 10 28 at 6:05:25 am

   each season’s leaf-kiss mantle

   NICE line.

6. 
   G 2007 11 09 at 1:28:53 pm

   Amazing poem. Simply amazing.