Kiss
by Nathan Erwin
After Nastassja Martin
Last night’s wind is over the mountains now.
The lofty sky’s cast with red. The mountains
are red. The clear brook has become
an aorta, pumping red, giving counsel to the morning’s rise:
my face is an open gulf,
crawling in wet snow, I can’t hear over my throat
slickened by internal tissue & fluid. My face, a caul,
pledging to the sinews of this life
with a rattle-breath symphony. The bear
left hours ago.
He huffed into the pines, jaw popping, bloody. My tourniquet wonders
at how long these clean runnels can hold the story of human love. My ancient phone
screams across the patchy landscape, prisons in the valley,
to a place already shrouded in night.
This encounter was seen by you years ago, your voice in the red
corner of the room, in the glow of your phone. You said, you become
what you pursue.
That next morning, we walked the orchard,
without such hooks as joy or lightness, we laid our bodies beside one another.
Your steady kiln-breath heated our forming. You, of course,
don’t think of this day, but my soul, or whatever is inside me, was imprisoned
in your skin. We have lived such long & separate lives.
I haven’t thought of our one & final kiss until this bleeding.
The bear’s kiss on my face, my jaw, my skull cracking,
The prison of your breath wrenched open by his pressure
& then the grip of his teeth letting go.
Silence. A long darkness quivering in the moon’s day, sky askew, I call out to silence.
I don’t recognize myself anymore. Dry blood litter. I hear like an animal.
The bear has left without me.
The drone of a helicopter arrives in the distance. Silence.
The forest is retreating beneath me & our kiss goes on.
Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. An IAF and Harvard trained organizer, Erwin currently operates at Boston Medical Center to prevent rural overdose deaths and at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust building healthy futures for farmers and land stewards. His writing has most recently appeared in Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, FOLIO, Bombay Gin, Rust & Moth, and Poet Lore. His organizing and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about land, drugs, myths, and wanting.
