"First Kiss" by Tim Seibles

First Kiss

Her mouth

fell into my mouth

like a summer snow, like a 5th season, like a fresh Eden,

like Eden when Eve made God

whimper with the liquid tilt of her hips—

her kiss hurt like that—

I mean, it was as if she’d mixed the sweat of an angel

with the taste of a tangerine,

I swear. My mouth had been a helmet forever

greased with secrets, my mouth

a dead-end street a little bit lit by teeth—my heart, a clam

slammed shut at the bottom of a dark,

but her mouth pulled up like a baby-blue Cadillac

packed with canaries driven by a toucan—I swear

those lips said bright wings when we kissed, wild

and precise—as if she were teaching a seahorse to speak—

her mouth so careful, chumming the first vowel from my throat

until my brain was a piano banged loud, hammered like that—

it was like, I swear her tongue was Saturn’s 7th moon—

hot like that, hot and cold and circling,

circling, turning me into a glad planet—

sun on one side, night pouring

her slow hand over the other: one fire flying the kite of another.

Her kiss, I swear—if the Great Mother rushed open the moon

like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally

unhooked from your wrist.

That’d be it, but even sweeter—

like a riot of peg-legged priests on pogo-sticks, up and up,

this way and this, not falling but on and on

like that, badly behaved

but holy—I swear! That kiss: both lips utterly committed

to the world like a Peace Corps,

like a free store, forever and always

a new city—no locks, no walls, just doors—like that, I swear,

like that.