Posted by Clay waiting for a sculptor’s hand to mold it, for a river to cleave it from its cliff face – I await your morning kiss. Asleep, dead, or awake as all, I stay by your side for as long as I can bare impatience at which point I wake up and yearn to make our breakfast.
I was drawn reading Rollo May the other day to this passage, “In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the center of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure. Nothing looks the same and may well never look the same again. The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole world shaking: where or when will it come to rest?”
In conditions so met with the polarizing dynamics of what life can be, will be, is, and death, the morning kiss meets love with a lack of complication. You either kiss or are kissed or, horribly, aren’t.
Morning Kiss for You My Darling
When I am away from you, I want to kiss you so badly my body gets stabbing aches in odd places – just now, my shins jolting with a pain as though yelling to constrict around your thighs. A kiss at any other time of day is perfectly good, yet the morning kiss is one I simply cannot do without. And of course the morning kiss is simply the first kiss of the day, or the one paired with good morning, or the one with an air of cinnamon and cardamom. Any others taste of our stresses and our worries, our distractions and whatever plagues the sun has deigned to place in our heads at any given interval. But the morning kiss.
The May passage earlier provoked in me this compulsion to resist: that not all love is an act in an antinomy with death. I tried to list all the things out that were joy without some implicit threat: if you connect hard enough you can extrapolate pain through it all. Except, I feel, the morning kiss. Perhaps one could argue that the morning kiss is the first celebration that you each survived, but I stress no: I would wait decades, centuries, and millennia to earn your morning kiss, honeybee.
“To love thee Year by Year –
May less appear
Than sacrifice, and cease –
However, dear,
Forever might be short, I thought to show –
And so I pieced it, with a flower, now.” – 434
Dickinson’s writing here gives me the courage to resist death’s impending urge, as I face aging and vulnerability and tenderness in my joints and soul, not to allow it to taint my relationship with these joys – as forever is indeed short and able to be touched by flowers or, as I hope, equally sweet things, like your love.