From Three Words of a Magnetic Poetry Set Found Caked in Dirt Beneath James Merrill’s Last Refrigerator

|Crimson| |Ring| |Touch|

It’s true, there is no substitute for touch,

for the kiss that sets a world in motion.

One caress is all it takes, watch any nurse

in a delivery ward; each warm fingerprint

is gift. Whole histories of the heart

could be devoted to what passes

in an instant, from the snow of old skin

tumbling like dazed moths in a blizzard

of sunlight to what turns crimson

when the lit red fuse passes from lip

to tongue in a kiss first registered

as shock then recognized, taken in—

inseen. As when your true love

says, “Your lips—a kissable music,”

before nodding off. Leaving your mouth,

that inflamed ripe monogram of O,

an unkissed wish, that tremor

in your bones, restored. The residue

of touch, the lipstick crimson rings—

a nutrient set to spreading in an instant.

Or at the promise of the touch to come,

a single note struck in the choir of itself,

when made to sing in us, is madrigal—

a resonance of every clear perception

of the world, even disappointment,

which might otherwise make for

a language cacophonous. But when

such sound takes residence in us,

the resonance instead becomes the love

we can do least without, the color of

a tapped black note, a surface shaped in

pressure—fissure, fault—of pigment, ink—

a single stroke, hoisted in the rafters of the mind;

which is just another way to know the origin

of touch as curative. (Being a little “touched”

is unavoidable.) But like a constellation

reflected perfectly then blurred in a wading pool

stirred by hand, the silver rings turn crimson

in a heart exposed, as if by touch alone, one

person, one life, might keep the world in motion.