A Reply to Shakespeare:
Kissing Time

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
                          —Shakespeare, Sonnet LXIV

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
                                   —Augustine, Confessions, Book 11

Today we are to speak of the supreme kiss . . . .
                                   —Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 8
                                   Commentary on the Song of Songs
 

He who binds to himself a joy / Does the winged life destroy;
He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sunrise.*
                                   —William Blake, Eternity
 

Time was I could tell what time is, but now
I bump into these cogs of memories
and desire’s sticky battle with my vow
to give up vain and craven reveries.
My shadow on the concrete sidewalk burns
the time from first I might have run upright
the African savannah’s dust, as churns
the genome, twisting that primordial light.

Yet nighttime when you are near fears no loss
(though galaxies will swirl, explode, and crush
our light into a hole, and, thoughtless, toss
our love’s sweet information into mush).
     The tenses grammar teaches are like graves.
     Your kisses are the kilter all time craves.