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I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes and I felt I was looking at a map and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and went inside and wrote it down: the cracked earth is a map.
- Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember”
Speaking of maps, memory, and Mary Ruefle, I keep coming back to this one, to this poem which resembles an aerial map of a brain mid-kiss.
Ruefle opens "Why I Am Not a Good Kisser" with a list of reasons – a brainstorm of images and explications, excuses and sidelong glances . One can feel the gaze moving from the window to settle on the little black dog as the speaker marvels at how the mind impinges on the duties of being present–or resting in the sublime transport of the kiss.
The poem occurs in the key of self-conscious reflexivity, or the inability to completely inhabit the flesh and sucuumb to the erotic moment. Eros wants us completely, not half-heartedly. Ruefle plays with the idea of a successful kiss as tied to the good kisser, the one who stops thinking about things. Enjambment is everything here:
& at once it strikes me what quality goes to form
A Good Kisser, especially at this moment, & which you
Possess so enormously — I mean when a man is capable
Of being in uncertainties, Mysteries & doubts without me
It could end there. It could end in the panic of not being enough for him. But the line continues, it drags on like a rubbed worrystone, delivering new ways of stating the same thing:
I am dreadfully afraid he will slip away
While my kiss is trying to think what to do.
I love this poem because it doesn’t know what to do with itself, and the speaker stands outside of the erotic moment to survey herself like a statue within it. The poem immortalizes the awkward, disconnected kiss. It destabilizes romantic expectations and runs off “into the mouth like a velvet movie theatre.”
What is the person thinking as we kiss them? What if the feeling of connection isn’t just illusory but an actual illusion? We assume a poem-worthy kiss would be monumental —- but this one isn’t. Ruefle defies even the shared excitation of kissing, or that space carved out by mutual desire acting in tandem, trying to meet between teeth.
Erotic excitation can be contagious. We drive faster when our hearts are racing with desire for the person in the seat next to us —- and our speed increases the pulse of the object of desire. We’ve known that suspense and fear have similar effects on the body as lust since the ancients. Erasistratus, a Greek anatomist who served as royal physician to Seleucus I Nicator of Syria, was the first to discover that love and pulse throb in unison. This poem refuses unison. Instead, it’s almost as if the speaker offers an aside, or a soliloquy, mid-kiss.
“The Kiss” as it appears on exhibit in the Tate Museum.
2
I saw Rodin’s sculpture, “The Kiss'“, while wandering through Paris with the first man whose name I imagined tattooed under my eyelids. The kiss I saw sat in a room filled with windows and sunlight; the stone shaped by the motion of shadows across the room. I remember noticing how the shadow of a windowpane ran across my sandal and then climbed up the kiss’ back.
According to the original 13th Century story, Francesca and Paolo fell for one another as they sat reading tales of courtly love. When Francesca’s husband, who was also Paolo’s brother, discovered them, he stabbed them to death. Rodin decided to depict the lovers at the moment of their first kiss. Look closely, and you can see the book slipping from the man’s left hand.
According to the Musee Rodin, where this statue is permanently housed: “The Kiss originally represented Paolo and Francesca, two characters borrowed, once again, from Dante’s Divine Comedy: slain by Francesca’s husband who surprised them as they exchanged their first kiss, the two lovers were condemned to wander eternally through Hell. This group, designed in the early stages of the elaboration of The Gates, was given a prominent position on the lower left door, opposite Ugolino, until 1886, when Rodin decided that this depiction of happiness and sensuality was incongruous with the theme of his vast project.”
Rodin reimagined the group into an independent piece which he exhibited the following year. The public named it. The French government commissioned this larger version in marble, which took Rodin a decade to finish. Of The Kiss as we know it, Rodin called it his “huge knick-knack”, and released it a companion piece to his monument for Balzac, perhaps hoping to borrow the sexiness of one to bolster the radical darkness of the other.
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Dante met Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of hell. Also housed in Musee Rodin: Iris, Messenger of the Gods. I remember circling it, trying to balance Rodin’s appetite with his aesthetic, or to locate a way in which one formed the other.
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We can look at Rodin's sculpture, "The Kiss," and write a poem about what each one is actually thinking during this kiss.
We can follow Ruefle, perhaps, by titling it in the negative, and using that as a sort of hint, a new trail into the poetics of kissing.
We can wonder about the kiss that led e. e. cummings to move towards the ending of “non-lecture three” with this:
So ends the second anecdote. You may believe it or not, as you wish. As far as I'm concerned, it's the unbelievable- but also unquestionable-selfportrait of a one hundred and one percent pseudoworld: in which truth has become televisionary, in which goodness means not hurting people, and in which beauty is shoppe. just (or unjust) how any species of authentic individualism could stem from such a collective quagmire, I don't-as always-know; but here are four lines of a p oem which didn't:
(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?