The kiss I just missed giving you wound up later on another mouth, but by then it had become a little cold and cruel. It wanted to be just burned off in sunbursts and cleansed of its longing. It imparted only melancholy. Where it goes now I don’t know. Probably to be used and used on other mouths. Each time, worn down a little more, like a coin, to its true longing. Perhaps it will reach you then from some impartial lover — from some dispassionate goodbye — like a stem cut from its rose. The kiss that didn’t make it to your mouth made it instead to Toronto, for I could not be rid of it in Palo Alto. It stained my lips even in Mendocino. In a Triumph Spitfire I could not, by singing out the window, leave a long, burning stream of it hissing in the air. It has become an irreconcilable wound now. A grand comparer. It lands on lips in a regular autumn but it will never be severed from its mouth. I wash it in water — it is there. I wash it in wine — still it is there. Drunken then, singing your name, mouthing it hot and burning into my mind, it has shown me its red edges, its arms and legs that didn’t ground. It has talked to me sadly of clothes, of beds it didn’t lie down in. What a weeper! It has dragged me under rain. Indelible. Indelible. Wants to go finally to the graveyard of old kisses, each one with its denied rose strolling ghostly over. Each one with its sunset nova quenched in amber on its headstone. Each of its stopped explosions driven down to juice in some white withering berry there.