Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta: "Gilding", "Landscape"

[halfcactus]

Gilding

Some darkness practicing on a tomcat. —Isak Dinesen

Anything dear requires a bit of shine:
Relic and surface, mirror and frame.
What's common as dust desires its burnish.

A poem is a public photograph in gold.
Pounded to leaf, a hard emotion
Is both delicate and strong,

Turns whisper-thin, and shines.
Handled with bare hands, it can tear
And collapse, practically, into thin air.

When I kiss your cheek, I let the blur
Into the flame; I let the flint inside
The skin; I lead the groove into the swelter,

And let you in. Love practices on us
Like darkness on a tomcat, turning us fine

As gloss bristled on wood. See how
The surface shines and will not hold?
See how we tear like burnished gold.

Landscape

In love, the landscape changes. Bridges are half-
way points. No one knows where they begin or end.

The sun cuts through a mesh of beams
And suddenly, one walks into light as one might

Walk into perfume; knows the exact moment
Lilac bleeds into orange, and after that, musk.

Language finds its tongue in want, and there are
Many words for absence: acute, wild, and night

Perpetual. But when we speak of the end of love,
We might as well speak of the end of language,

The way specialists tell of a dying English: words
So quickly on the move, their meanings change.

Dirty, for one, and then, arcane.
What survives are words so old, we speak them now

As in ancient lore: one and two, and later, four.
Staying words every clock keeps, at any time.

No one but the lover knows the oldest words are
The first to go: I, for one, and the brevity of you,

In an arcane bar, the words dirty with longing.

Comments

[nnozomi]

These are lovely, thank you for posting them. Poet's name noted to keep an eye out for <3

[halfcactus]

♥