Kinnell told us it takes touch to find our blessings, the secret between a saint and a sow. 

We didn’t listen; we forgot our hands; our mouths bent around the shape of self-doubt. 

We couldn’t tell you about pleasure if it walked past us singing its own promises. 

But we could linger in that evening of not knowing. Everyone else 

drifting by in pairs or speeding past in solitude. Tempos that cannot touch each other. 

O vulnerable hunger. 

Gabriel says we love our forms and I know it’s true. We want our sonnets to be a perplexity that wears our face.  

We love our hogs to snout and snuffle, lonely as dirt. And to be American is to want what doesn’t love you back. 

Though to have that conversation, you would have to practice another form of longing. 

An unrequited composition: my hands unfolded like pages meant for holding. 

O erotic nonsense. 

As if we contain a stillness so sharp our gentleness is the only possible transformation.  

Even then – we search for devotion believing it to be the place between inadequacy and completion. We unearth 

a little soil, a little song. A long, perfect loveliness.