White of snow or white of page is not

Rebecca Seiferle

the white of your skin, for skin, except

when truly albino, always has some other color

sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf,

a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting

stream, a richness implied of its many layers,

the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity

that lies within and makes the skin shed, not

like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden

cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge

of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment

while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing

seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid

ease of being—one resting upon the other,

the sliver of your shoulder against the black

fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty

that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed

(as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga

whales came swimming toward me—how white

they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant

and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent

as white fire, gliding through the weight of water,

and when they sang in that chamber as small

as the chambers of the human heart, murky

with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments

of what they had consumed, I was almost in love

with them; they seemed the lost children

of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins

a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other

of all the existences they had left behind, their fins

like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling

like canaries of the sea: there was no darkness

in their bodies, like clouds drifting through

unkempt skies, they illuminated the room).

So I did not think of you so much as I felt you

drifting through my being, in some gesture

that held me poised like a hummingbird above

the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you

above the heart, and by above I mean there,

not that geometric center, the breastbone

that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake

for the place where the heart lies, but the exact

location, a little to the left, just on the crescent

where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know

all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing,

the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin

and night that opens in imagination and in feeling

upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above

the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could

kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head

of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where

angels were once believed to dance, and all that

nakedness without could not have been

except for all that burning deep within