First Kiss : Poem In Your Post

At Lucy Vincent Beach,

Easter Sunday, 1986

                       Martha's Vineyard

In that long moment when you are trying to decide
whether to kiss someone for the first time
and they are trying to decide whether to kiss you,
the waves break against the rocks
and light shimmies like a skater over the beach,
and you reflect (as her body edges
toward the side of you and she grows -
as men and women will in the dappled light -
increasingly beautiful) on the seeming innocence
of the first kiss, on how, in hundreds
of previous incarnations, you had intended
no evil, but had merely grown,
like a distended flower in early spring,
into the good natural upwardness of all longing,
yes, you reflect on this now, as the gulls waft
like serenity over the waves,
as some larger fidelity patrols the beach
and you realize how meaning follows gesture
into the night, how there is no hurry in this life
aside from death, how today's light will be
resurrected again in tomorrow's dawn, and all
that the tide brings in from the ambiguous sea
will be there for you again, without haste, on some
lovelier tomorrow, and whatever the trembling lips
need to speak, they will ultimately speak, against
whatever the tide brings, whatever it takes away.

                                 - Michael Blumenthal

MFB,
L