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Susan Barbour

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There

In the beginning, it was the mahogany V
in your upper lip that I loved,

the way you put your lethal white
teeth over the lower

when you finished a statement,
as though you could

retract your words a little,
which only gave them emphasis,

like when you told me
we had ‘the kind of connection’

that seemed to you ‘unique’.
With silence surrounding it

and your teeth biting its gravity back,
‘unique’ seemed something so grand

and barely utterable—similar
to how you once made ‘there’ sound,

when you told me, ‘it just wasn’t,’
rendering ‘there’ a mistress

so light and immaterial
I could hardly grasp her—that is

get my hands around her throat.
What a thrifty muse you are

to cast out such words,
whole flocks of meaning,

only to round them up again,
licking and biting them back

behind the pearly gates of your palate
while I stand by, recording

the ethereal promise that hovers
and hungers to be transcribed

in my imagination, indelibly
and between us (thank heavens)

in disappearing ink.

Page(s) 63-64

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