Darling do you remember
the [one] you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
—Stanley Kunitz
It is early enough that fog still skeins,
like moss, the highest branches.
And twining each tree: a cable
rough-creped as wild grape vine,
with both ends socketed
into the trunk. Murmur
and fizz of power pulled
from the sky, from the earth—power recirculated
by the cables, nothing wasted.
In a clearing
no bigger than our cabin’s double bed, you spread
a blue blanket. We make a picnic
of a peach and a plum. Then, with no top sheet, no
clothes, not even a bracelet—How long has it been,
love, since we touched? Even
our kisses are given on the way
to something else.
Yet here, our bodies
do not just tighten but seal
fast around the other and we
kiss the kind of kiss that’s like entering
a glass cathedral, a structure that exists
to emphasize the space it contains
while leaving visible all it does not.
And we move
into that kiss as we move
into each other—with gentle
force, a matched insistence—
and all the trees begin to hum. Self-charging circuits,
all of us, drawing from the world
a stream of heat and light, which we pass between us
like a fire that burns but does not consume.
I wake to your back; to the dream, over. To your body
like an early-morning house
in which all the inhabitants are still
asleep, the lights extinguished, the doors locked. Yet
beside the bed, the marigolds you brought me
burn like paper caught in the act of ignition, orange and red
petals of flame. And on each of our ring-fingers, the same
silver band: my promise to you,
my charge, that through the forest and the fog, through
the busy thicket of daily brambles, I will
never stop finding my way
to your door. All I need from you
is to answer;
all you have to do is let me in.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of Pelvis with Distance, winner of the New Mexico Book Award. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published in 2016 and her second full-length collection Take Me with You, Wherever You're Going is forthcoming in 2019. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, editor, and professor, and now serves as the Associate Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown.
Photo from foter.com