Free If There is Something to Desire by Vera Pavlova

20
One Touch in Seven Octaves
I
    A light touch with a slant
    like a first-grader’s handwriting, with a tilt:
    you brush away a hair from my cheek
    with a motion vaguely tender, stretching
    my face slightly upward and to the left,
    turning me into a doe-eyed geisha.
    With a slant, yet in a straight line:
    the shortest and the quickest path.
II
    The trick is in the suffixes, diminutive and endearing:
    to diminish first, then to caress,
    and by caressing to reduce to naught,
    and then to search in panic, where can you be?
    Have I dropped you into the gap
    between the body and the soul?
    And all the while you are right here,
    in my arms. So heavy, so enormous!
III
    First, cursory caresses, on the surface,
    light, a kind of coloratura: crumbs of
    pizzicato in spots which seemingly require
    a brusque, tempestuous treatment,
    then with a bow across the secret strings,
    the ones that were not touched at the beginning,
    then across the non-existent strings or, more exactly,
    the ones we have never suspected of existing.
IV
    Are my palms rubbing your shoulders,
    or are your smooth shoulders rubbing my palms,
    making them drier, sharper, more perfect?
    The more repetitive a caress, the more healing it is.
    Water slowly grinds stone; caresses
    make the body light, chiseled, compact,
    the way it wants to be,
    the way it once had been.
V
    Who plays blindman’s buff with those aged twenty,
    hide-and-seek with those aged thirty?
    Love does. Ah, the silky pelts,
    the simple rules, the witless stakes!
    Is it easy at thirty-five to say good-bye to love?
    It is, not for the reasons of great shame involved,
    but because there is no spot more tender, rosier,
    more concealed than a scar.
VI
    Within a hand’s reach from the foreskin
    is fleshlessness, dense, resonant, boundless.
    Touching, because of its nature, takes part
    in the mystery of disembodiment.
    I am rid of the body, but the shiver stays,
    and so do the pain, the joy.
    The shiver, the pain, the joy have no fear
    that the skin might never reappear.
VII
    How tender the sensation of ants racing,
    how many shivers in a slow progression!
    Some take no less than a full five minutes
    to get from one vertebra to the next.
    For years a gentle hand has been the trainer
    coaxing them to run from one tiny hair
    to the next, until the finish line,
    until it is madness, until … 
Hey,
    are you sleeping?

21
    The first kiss in the morning
    tastes like the first kiss on Earth.
    My waking soul is innocent,
    as I lie next to the tenant
    of my best dreams.
    When I caress him, I know:
    a kiss is preverbal,
    a word is a kiss’s junior.

22
    Enough painkilling, heal.
    Enough cajoling, command,
    even if your fiery joys
    mean endless inequality
    and melt our vessels
    that are dispensable.
    Enough rehashing, create.
    Enough lying to the sick:
    they will not get well.

23
    Mom was an axiom.
    Dad was a theorem.
    I was a sleeping beauty
    in the cradle of home.
    The cradle has capsized.
    Now the end is the means.
    Cradlewrecked beauty, keep an eye
    on your mother who is an infant again.

24
    Why do I recite my poems by heart?
    Because I write them by heart,
    because I know that kind of spleen
    by heart. But I lie to the pen,
    not daring to describe how I ambled
    along the distant ramparts of love,
    barefoot, wearing a birthday suit:
    the placental slime and blood.

25
    I ought to remember: I was four,
    she was two months and twenty days.
    My sister-death is still in her grave.
    I know nothing of her.
    Maybe that is why in each moment of joy
    an immense grief lurks,
    as if I were sitting at an empty crib,
    my gown wet with milk.

26
    Those who are asleep in the earth
    have an avian sense of the way.
    Gone, they sleep with shoes on,
    ready to rise and go
    to the pink, dispensable,
    barefooted insomniacs
    who had laced up for them
    the last pair of shoes.

27
    Immortal: neither dead nor alive.
    Immortality is fatal.
    Let us embrace. Your arms are
    the sleeves of a straitjacket,
    a life vest to stay