So close—the intimacy of our kiss
is an illusion, an electric echo,

a chemical leap from skin to thought.
We cannot escape this passage, cannot

face the future. You are gone,
a storehouse of presence like a stitch

that cannot be the needle's weave
that pierces cloth. Still our lips meet

with perfect anticipation and brush
a landscape defying delay. We twine

despite our sense's failure. We are
the switch and not the light. We are

the point on the page and not the phrase,
those futile marks our minds design.

Only when we surrender, let
the past propel into the past,

only here, when we forgo
the chance of knowing the other's lips,

that pleasured pressure face to face,
only in that unmeasured moment

do we touch.

-- Bill Trudo