Better Living Through Introspection

If this isn’t nice, what is?

If this isn’t nice, what is?
If this bed isn’t nice, what is?
If waking up next to you isn’t nice, what is?
If your hand clenching mine isn’t nice, what is?

If your fluttering heart, each beat visible
in the elegant turn of your neck, marking time
toward the relentless, unavoidable end doesn’t make me wish
for more than twenty-four hours in a day, what will?

If I can’t immortalize emotions in words, carving
life with ink and pressure, sheer desperation
forcing me to balance what is and what is not
within my grasp, who can?

If life isn’t nice, what is?

N.B. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake, the narrator quotes on numerous occasions his uncle Alex who insists on celebrating the simple occassions in life during which things are going well by saying, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Separation

If I could slice the air between us
and label each cell accordingly
with translucent color-coded tabs
I would easily identify at a glance
the layers of intimacy
separating us.

I could pick a slice at random
hold it up to the light and see
patterns of atrophication and growth over time,
the attenuation and accretion of nerve endings,
the amorphous shadows of flesh and bone, and
at any given time know the classification
and degree of our separation.

Then, at least my mind would be at ease. But
the empiric heart remains uneasy swimming in analysis;
it derives what it can touch — it would rather I run my hands
through the moonlight on your skin for one night
and wander alongside memory thereafter,
constantly questioning what remains between us
instead of attempting divination through science.

Dinner in Lebanon, rewritten

When we departed for dinner in Lebanon
the gladiator was still a general unleashing hell
in Ridley’s epic, so we left him behind and feasted
in the light of a campfire underneath the cypress trees,
underneath the stars on the side of a white mountain; hungry
from our journey, we gorged on roasted lamb, on goat’s cheese,
on olives and dates and figs, on sweet garlicky hummus,
drowning ourselves in water and wine - the world was full
of nervous anticipation, and we shoveled into the empty pauses
the history and lineage of our families, the bloodlines that tied us
to a lakeside city on the plains where our parents’ parents
shared time unlike space.

When we returned separately to our new worlds I found
the gladiator dying face up in the sands of the coliseum,
and there was a kiss hanging between us. I can’t recall
how long I burned buoyantly under its pressure…not long
enough, just short of an eternity; but as the gladiator bled
I realized already my mistake witnessing in our kiss
the harbinger of graceful summer when in reality I tasted
winter wrapped in a satin promise. That kiss
was the gladiator’s ringed hand, gliding through
the wheatfields of his dream-sequence home, caressing
each stalk in order to know the lay of the land. I should
have given more time to his trials than I did
to our dinner in Lebanon.

Dinner in Lebanon

When we departed for dinner in Lebanon
the gladiator was still the general, unleashing hell
in the forests of Germania. So we left him behind
to eat around a campfire on the side of a white mountain
underneath the cypress trees, underneath the stars.
Hungry from our voyage, we gorged ourselves
on a traveler’s feast of hummus and pita
and olives and cheese and lamb. The world was full
of nervous anticipation, and we shoveled
into the empty pauses the history and lineage
of our families, the bloodlines that tied us
to a lakeside city in the plains where our parents’
parents shared time if not the close space we
occupied for seconds on the mountainside.

When we returned separately to a new world we found
the gladiator dying face up in the sands of the coliseum,
and there was a kiss hanging between us. We can’t recall
how long we burned buoyantly in its pressure…
just short of an eternity, perhaps. One of us mistakenly
witnessed in that kiss the harbinger of a graceful summer,
but in reality we had tasted winter wrapped in satin promise.
Our kiss was the gladiator’s ringed hand, gliding through
the unharvested wheat on his dream-sequence farm.
We should have given more time to his trials
then we did to dinner in Lebanon.

Touch

”When I touch her, I say ‘Is this real?’ And it is. She is real.”
— Donghua Xue upon the return of his wife Gao Zhan from Beijing July 28, 2001

I am afraid to touch you, afraid the demand of my hand on your body
might force this present to yield, reverse, snap back through our shared continuum
and return the intimate rule of the thousand-mile void in its place.

You have been held against your will as you were held against my heart,
and this sweet pressure like a cloud between our skins tells me according to
the strict virtue of logic that an absent love restored can disappear again.

Yet you are lying next to me breathing free, so as long as my reach
ends with you, our future stays in this touch.