Masthead

Tact

I have no tact
so balanced on my lips and fingers to touch
                           upon your skin, that knows
how to touch your invisible feeling,   those tears beneath your skin.
              Whether asleep or awake,
my words fall upon your pulse
with a wincing weight,
                            so fumble-fingered or glass shattering
and that sometimes sliver that rankles, so far beneath the nail.
              Oh, tact- I have no sense
                                         of you, my lost sense
of the senses, once measured among
                                        auditus, gustus, odoratus
like a living species of bee: in all that lightning
of the tastebuds, all that fire
                                          on the tongue
of crushed pods
of burning seasons,
              the nose's delicate
                                          intertwining
with filaments of scent,
              the whorls of the ears catching in their intricate coils
                            the membranes trembling in seawaves of sound,
                                          or
could have heard
the pain in you that made you breathless
                            in your sleep, and how you winced
              awake. I wish I spoke
                                                                      some other language
of moon cognates
              and warming verbs, to make that tragedy
                                                        I have given you
                            a comedy of bees
                                          that enter, innocently, the meadowy sex
                                                                      of orchids,
                                          until the mind's only
                                          divine with dizzy
                                          starlight
so many selves within our cells. If I were tactful,
I might have heard what
              you could not say
                                          all the damp extinguishment
                                                        of being,
                                          your tears of char
at trying to stub
out that burning brand
              in your aortal flesh,
                            those tears go mute, are never shed, they sting
the most lidded eye. You might never have thought it fatal
                                                        to open the pages of the subtleties of angels, all that light breaking
              the "I" open with desert architectures
                                                        of blossoms and thorns
                                          or mistaken yourself
                                                        for an empty spiral
                                                        beneath a beaded mask,
if I could have been some other language, perhaps a lullaby
              in French,
a gypsy canto
              lilting by your window on a summer's night, so tactful
it might have seemed the body's anonymous song,
                            overheard, in passing, as if meant
                                      &nsp;   for anyone else, I might have been
as tactful
              as tongue of bee is to what it penetrates and tastes,
as nimble as the body
              of feeling is with its eyelashes that lightly brush
through empty air. Would have abandoned the verbs
                            for "see" and "know"
and been so touched
and touching,
              that as the desert opens
at the dew,
                            you could have been that slowest snail
that fills up with the rain
              that fell like kisses so long ago, so tactful
with its slow going
over stones, that in the silver moisture of its track,
              the meadow itself would have seemed
to shimmer
                            like angels giving birth to laughter.

Rebecca Seiferle

>>>No Quarter by Colin Robinson

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