The Bread We Eat in Dreams

When I kissed her

she tasted like Mars.

Like red cupolas, gilt-spangled,

etched steel cockerels snapping

at a dry, weedy dawn.

She tasted like new streets,

rolled out like silk rugs across meridians,

like a girl

who might not remember what Earth looked like,

even a little,

even a pine tree,

even a sea.

When I kissed her

she tasted like gunmetal cities

pricked with soapy, foaming green:

strange-bred grasses clutching at air,

like a polished sheet of polar ice,

and she dancing upon it, a new kind of beast,

feet blue and bare,

heedless, atavistic, her hair an explosion

which, of course, is red,

could never have been anything other

than red.

In her kiss,

she walks naked through Hellas Planitia;

her pilgrim road all on fire, under crystal,

under a golden sizzle of solar wind.

Her teeth on my lips I watch her buy

this memory from a bazaar,

drink krill from a pink glass vial,

mate with a toad-skinned boy,

and hold against her small breasts

an ultraviolet bubble

wherein she and I are kissing,

forever,

so very like living things.

When I kissed her

she tasted like two moons tumbling,

gleaming, old bones cast into the sky

to foretell my own obsolescence.

What place I, in the place where she lives?

What good my French cuffs

in that long desert?

When I kissed her I knew

she was not like me:

she knew none of the secret

houndstooth shames

that gentlemen know.

Her Galapagos-soul

had flashed past all that,

and she moved like dust on the plain.

A gentleman comes boldly,

when he comes.

He knocks at a little round door,

all etiquette, bred like a dog

to race after her, oh, to run,

while she speeds ahead in her uncatchable orbit,

spinning on her silver rod

always,

always,

so very like a living girl,

always,

always,

so very much faster than he.

I cannot go to Mars.

I am extinct there—

customs would never let me pass.

The days of maids yelping in chicken yards,

scared half to death of a hymen

are gone.

When I kissed her

she tasted like change,

like the face of the moon

suddenly showing her dark.

I did not notice.

Still yet in the chicken yard,

thinking it mattered,

that it would bother her,

I curdled the milk and ruined the beer,

unspun the wool and frightened the cows,

crowing at my body’s breadth—

while she, oil-grimed, skull shaved,

quietly built red engines

to carry herself off.

My hands in her hair,

I looked up in the smoky night,

to a red thing in the sky,

and began to break along the seams,

to fold and arc like a steel cockerel

straining at the sun,

to sear into a thing

that might match her;

not gentle, not bred,

a thing which might taste

of orange domes like bodies rising,

of pilgrim blood both savage

and serene.